Fic: FS, PG-13, bob/gen, "The Morning, the Evening and the Night"
Title: The Morning, the Evening and the Night
Rating: PG-13 (Gen with bob content.)
Fandom: Farscape.
Characters: John Crichton, Aeryn Sun, and various other walk-ons.
Summary: There is no ending, there is no beginning, there is no moral, there is no truth, there is nothing recorded for the ages to come. 10,000 words.
Warnings/Spoilers: Assumes knowledge of Season Three. Assumes canon relationships - except when it goes AU. Goes AU at distressingly regular intervals. Contains occasional quasi-religious references of a Christian variety. Title from (most directly) the Octavia E. Butler short story.
Disclaimer/Permissions/Contact: Characters are property of Kemper and Hensen. This is a work of fanfiction. No money is being made and no copyright infringement is intended. Please do not archive without permission - will be archived at Leviathan eventually. Please credit the author if remixing/borrowing original characters. Reviews and feedback (positive, not positive, concrit, pointing out stupid spelling mistakes - all welcome) need neither permission nor notification. Contact the author at hosscheka@yahoo.com.
Author's Note: For kazbaby's "Disneyland on Crack" Farscape Pot Luck Ficathon. Written for Simplystars, who asked for (among other things) "John and Aeryn, after Season 2." With thanks to Searose and Queen Al, who looked at portions of this years ago. And with thanks to Cofax, who cast an eye on the early efforts of a novice ficwriter, and encouraged her to keep going. Errors in all their multitude - including excessive obscurity, Farscapean levels of inaccuracy in biological (and physical) science, and passages that just plain fail to make sense - remain mine.
Author's Note 2: It may interest the reader to note that John Crichton's initials are "J. C." It might enlighten the reader to know that the author used various sequences from the Bible as starting places for these stories. It may amuse to reader to know that, for some years now, this has been the oldest unfinished Farscape story in my WIPs file. When I say that I don't abandon stories, I mean it. Some of them just take longer than others.
Despite the length of time, this is pretty much how I figured the fic to come out from the begining. I hope it appeals to someone-not-the-author as well.
I. Center of the Garden
A wicker basket balanced on one hip and a rough-woven straw hat jammed low over her eyes, Aeryn walked slow and steady over the rough-tilled patch of dirt. John watched her approach from the corner his eye but said nothing; despite her burdens, Aeryn's feet were sure.
John’s were mud-caked and bare. Three nights spent working the wet dirt from his boots had taught him to leave the footwear at the edge of the field. Aeryn had frowned at the drop in hygiene standards, and refused to copy him, saying that she preferred to scrape her boots free of dried mud, rather than her skin. And as John was doing most of the field work, she could afford the time spent boot polishing.
Now, she marched delicately down the row where John labored, stopping beside him to carefully kneel and relinquish the broad basket of transplants.
The narrow-leafed tuber sprouts trembled as the basket shifted, threatening to tumble out. Aeryn passed a warning hand over them, her fingers barely brushing the plants as she tucked them back into the basket.
John hid a smile. The gesture might have appeared maternal, to someone else. To someone who stood out of earshot, not hearing Aeryn Sun mutter under her breath " - and tear all your leaves off." The slips shivered once more and subsided.
Aeryn stood and set both hands in the small of her back. Slowly, elbows jutting out like a strutting crane's wings, she turned in a circle once, then twice again. John stabbed the digging stick into the dirt and leaned on the end, watching Aeryn scan the mountainsides bracketing their valley.
That morning the sun had risen in a sky untouched by cloud or mist. Now, just before noon, colorless puffs dotted the bright blue vault. Solitary handfuls now, the clouds had been slowly increasing in size and number as they crept in from the west, heralding the towering thunderhead they would become before nightfall.
Beneath their shadows, the vermilion forests lay like thick velvet on the mountains. Distance made the tall canopy into a mossy nape, and the rare stone outcropping into a pebble dropped on a bed of lichen. The only road lay on the valley floor - the only sign of civilization a single smoke line rising half a day distant.
When Aeryn's eyes fell on him, he grinned. Her features sharpened into a frown. "What?"
He hid his face against his arms and shook his head. "Nothing. Nothing." Lifting his head again, he cleared his expression and said, "So?"
"So?"
"Was there anyone? Any Scarrens? Any Peacekeeper retrieval squads? Any herds of bantahs?"
She folded her arms. "No. No. And I do not know."
"Trust me, babe, if there had been bantahs you would know it." He straightened and pulled the digging stick free of the earth. "That's the third time you've done that this morning, Aeryn. Something bugging you?"
Reflexively, she scratched at her bare arms. As she moved, the tunic's material stretched tight over her swollen belly. "No, nothing I can define. Just - just a feeling." She let her hands fall, slipping over the pulse pistol as she did.
She wore it in a shoulder harness now. John noted that her hand still went to her hip first. He grunted, levered the stick down with one foot, and kept moving down the row. Another hillock, then a third, and John stopped again.
"Man, it's hot out here." He wiped his face with his shirttail, carefully not looking at Aeryn. She ignored him as well; her face tilted upward, eyes slitted against the light. Finally, he said, "Sun not getting to you, babe?"
"No, I'm fine." Sweat stood out on her arms and collarbones. John cast an eye at the bright sky and set his mouth.
Aeryn's heat tolerance had gradually decreased, even as the days grew warmer. Nothing to be gained from arguing with her to stay out of the sun. Suggesting she could stop guarding their valley or helping him in the field was equally pointless. A solid week of sullen silence, broken by random screaming fights, had led, eventually, to a compromise. John had slung a hammock in the shade beneath the trees uphill of the field. From it Aeryn could watch both the field and the curve of the road, far down the valley. A convenient branch had a hook to hang her pistol. Most days, she could be trusted to retreat to the shade and drowse away the hottest hours of the day.
Today she had been restless - gathering a second and third basket of transplants, fetching more water when the barrel was still a third full, repeatedly walking the perimeter of the cleared field. And always watching the mountainsides.
As she was now, staring at the slopes with a fey expression.
He opened his mouth, on the verge of saying something when Aeryn shook her head and said, "I am going to rest now. Unless you need more infant plants." She turned her head a fraction, the corner of her mouth twitching up.
John shut his mouth, still not sure what he could have said, and shook his head. "No, no, these are plenty."
She nodded, set a hand on his shoulder, and walked away, feet sinking deep in the worked dirt.
He watched her go, until she looked back and caught him watching her. He ducked his head and levered at the stick. The faint thread of her laugh floated back to him, but he did not look up.
Tilling the tuber field and setting the transplant sprouts was easily the hardest work John had ever done. Four days had taught him to find a rhythm and not over-exert himself. Noon came, then passed, with the hottest part of the day still to come. John was nearing the end of the basket when a shadow fell over his hands. He looked up at Aeryn, her eyes focused far down the valley.
"What's up?"
"Didn’t you hear me calling? Someone is approaching. A small ship, low to the surface." She had the rifle that was their single heavy weapon slung across her back and Winona in her off hand.
John didn't waste time looking. Taking the proffered pistol in one hand and snatching up his boots in the other, he followed Aeryn as she jogged up the path to the observation point. Slipping under the camouflaging brush, he knelt beside her and took the bi-lens she passed without a word.
Through the distance viewers, the greens of the forest smote his vision even harder than they did the naked eye. Wincing, he dialed down the contrast and began scanning the road. At their end of the valley, the twists of the river took the two-rut trail in and out of view. Further downstream, the valley opened up and the road ran straight beside the narrow waters. Straight or not, the road was still gravel and dirt, and the low-flying pod trailed a cloud of ivory dust.
"Transport pod," he said, just as Aeryn murmured, "Got them." The rifle’s sniper scope hummed as she tapped in windage adjustment.
"Can you hit them from here? Take them down?"
She grunted and twisted her hips, dragging one knee up to compensate for the bulge of her belly. "Hit, yes. But I can’t promise to bring it down. Cripple, possibly. Unless it’s armored." A fractional adjustment of her elbows. "Do you want me to try?"
In the bi-lens, the pod flew level and straight, at a pace that could almost be
called sedate. John hesitated. Three seasons on this world, and they had seen no one from outside the valley. Even the village tax collector had come up the road on foot.
It was a very quiet corner of a very quiet world. The smoke from a crashed transport pod would rise for a great distance. And the thought of shooting down unidentified travelers still brought a bitter taste to his mouth.
"No." Beside him, Aeryn did not move, but a measure of the tension in her shoulders flowed away. Together they watched as the pod trundled its way up the valley, dipping out of sight and popping back into view. The propulsion whine increased, rose to a piercing screech as the pod passed their position, still hugging the river.
John turned to watch it go, thinking for a heartbeat that the pod would pass them by. Then it banked sharply hammon-ward and circled the tuber field.
"They’re going for a landing," and in Aeryn's voice John heard regret for the lost shot.
"Stay here," he said, but it was wish, not command. She was at his back as he ran back down the trail.
The pod’s VTO jets wailed and the blast kicked up a surprising amount of dust from the damp loam. A mist of sand hissed against the brush even as the exhaust sent the branches wildly tossing. John remained in the leafy concealment, the undergrowth no more hid him from the pod’s sensors than would a coat of Day-Glow orange body paint on a white sand beach. Aeryn crouched behind him, the auto-burst selector lit gold. She shifted position to bring the rifle to bear on the opening ramp. John reached back, finger tips grazing her arm. We could have run, we should have run, he thought. Then the jet whine faded and he heard Aeryn's breath, rasping, winded from the short dash down the hill. Running was no longer an option.
A figure appeared in the entry way. Aeryn's arm moved under John’s fingers. "Hold on," he said, as the figure descended the ramp, and the sun’s yellow light fell across an ivory puffball of hair. One colorless palm shaded grey eyes scanning the forest’s edge.
John rose to his feet and came forward of the brush. "Chiana."
She was already dashing down the ramp, arms wide. John grunted under the impact. He returned the embrace, feeling Chiana's laugh through his ribs.
"Crichton! We found you!" She released him and bounced on her toes at arm’s length. He felt an echoing laugh building up inside him. Chiana held his shoulder with one hand and waved towards the pod with the other. "Sikozu! We found them!"
A second shadow appeared in the entryway, this time with a head of flame. Chiana turned back to John, her delighted grin diminishing a fraction. "We did, didn’t we? Where’s Aeryn?"
Sikozu paced down the ramp, thick-soled boots ringing on the metal panel. Her expression was Sikozu of old - arrogance and trepidation coated with scorn. And beneath that - below the smile and half-bow of welcome - something else. John set Chiana aside. Sikozu, no fool, stopped halfway up the ramp. Chiana looked from one to the other. "Crichton? What’s going on?"
He shook his head, keeping his eyes on Suzuki "Oh, Crichton, don't be like that." Chiana's fingers were soft on his arm, tugging him up the ramp. When he resisted, she let his hand slip from hers and stepped up beside Sikozu.
At her touch, Sikozu let her gaze drop from John’s and turned her face to Chiana. "Crichton. It’s Sikozu. And me." Sikozu's nose trailed along Chiana’s cheek. Her eyes, rising again to John’s, were defiant.
His fingers twitched on Winona's butt grip. Sikozu's gaze flickered to his gun hand and back. And there it was - under the arrogance and the fear hunger. Sikozu wanted something.
"Yes, Crichton. Have you no welcome for old comrades?" He matched her stare from the base of the ramp. He did not know what he would have said, Pip or no Pip, except that Aeryn was suddenly beside him, rifle on her hip.
"Not when they land their craft on this summer’s food supply." Chiana whooped and flung herself at Aeryn. Aeryn swung the rifle aside and hugged Chiana back. John watched Aeryn's entire face crease into a smile as they embraced. Chiana leaned back, her hands on Aeryn’s arms then on her rounded belly.
"Aeryn! You’re as big as a Leviathan! Sikozu - look at this!" Aeryn laughed at Chiana’s expression and reached to welcome Sikozu as well.
And that tilted the balance, despite the look of smug victory Sikozu cast over her shoulder. When Aeryn looked to him, he nodded before she had need to ask. An arn, an afternoon - the tubers could wait.
"Too damn hot out here, why don't you girls come sit with us? Let us show you round the place."
Aeryn led the way back up the trail to the chickee. Chiana tagged close behind, nearly treading on Aeryn's heels and dodging the rifle butt that swung with Aeryn's strides. Sikozu followed at a more moderate pace. Her head swiveled from side to side, drinking in the vermilion growth. He could all but hear the wheels in her head turning, cataloging, comparing, making tentative relationships and preliminary conclusions. If he had never seen the Kalish do this before, he might have thought her lost in the surroundings.
He watched her run a finger over the slick surface of a broad-leaf vine and knew her study to be a sham. Sikozu caught him staring at her and smiled before stretching her legs to catch the others.
At the chickee - a raised, wall-less platform, with a high, palm-thatched roof - Chiana gazed about with amazement at the open walls, a firepit in the yard, a shared pallet on the unfinished log floor.
"And, err...facilities?" Sikozu's face was a study in fascinated abhorrence.
The expression that slipped over her countenance when Aeryn explained the downhill pit was priceless. Chiana clapped her hands and laughed out loud. "Wide open spaces! All that you could want!" Sikozu's smile, when it came, was late, and forced.
Under the chickee's open sided shelter there was little room to entertain guests - their seating was, even after more than a year, little more than their shared bedroll and a scattering of ship-board store-alls. Chiana perched beside Aeryn, a hand constantly on the other woman's shoulder or arm. Sikozu serenely bustled about under Aeryn's direction, fetching the two smallest pots for tea bowls, digging through the largest crate for a stash of ground darkbean. John, coming back with a water skin leaking down his leg, scowled at Aeryn.
"I thought you said we ran out."
She turned guileless eyes to him. "I must have been mistaken. Or you were. We had the package all along."
Among the things scattered from the crate unpacking was the extra pulse pistol cartridge. Aeryn nodded as Chiana spoke, her hands sorting their belongings automatically. Then Aeryn's hand closed on the cartridge.
"John, here," she said, and tossed it under hand. He caught it automatically, and she she went back to her task, setting the rest into a loose heap for Sikozu to toss back into the crate.
There were a number of things in that box. John watched with half an eye as the Kalish repacked folded leather coats, an old orange flightsuit, and a notebook with half the pages still blank. Sikozu's hands ran over it like silk over polished marble, and then she put it resolutely away. Carefully. Under Aeryn's old coat, on top of the rest of the knickknacks - with the rest of the things they had no use for on this world.
A rush of wind made the forest toss, rattled the chickee thatch. He watched them as Aeryn sat with Chiana, pale hands holding Aeryn's sun-touched ones easily. Saw Sikozu's carefully blank expression.
When the Kalish rose to her feet, announcing her intention to visit the ship, John stood with her.
"Mind if I tag along?" He gestured at the ship. "It's been so long since I saw anything with lights and hot water."
"Of course not."
He walked beside her, let her fill the air with chatter about some research she had completed in the year since their last parting. Leviathan migration patterns. Guileless, commonplace. Ordinary.
For all that she had pretended innocence, Sikozu did not cry out when, two steps inside the transport pod, John shoved her against the wall and pulled Winona from his jacket. "Why are you here?" he snarled. "And don't," he said, as she opened her mouth to protest, "feed me some bullshit about a honeymoon trip to see old folks. That's why Chiana's here. Why. Are. You. Here?"
She was tempted to lie to him, and later, he could never decide if she had or not.
"Peacekeeper High Command has sued the Scarrens for peace. They've officially given up on wormhole weapons." She swallowed. "They've terminated the search for you. It's not widely known, but it will be, in half a cycle, or less."
He stared at her. "I don't - so?" His mind was reeling. "Even if the Peacekeepers have given up, there are still enough idiots out there who want my head."
"I came because even if the Peacekeepers have stopped fighting the Scarrens, I haven't. Scorpius has been discredited, High Command is fractured. But I know -" She took a deep breath. "I can provide the resources and the materials. Technicians. Work space. We can produce a wormhole weapon, and force the Scarrens into a peace that lasts more than five cycles."
"No." He stepped back from her, the pulse pistol still in his hand. "No."
"Crichton -"
"I said, no. Don't - don't ask again." His hands were trembling. So, he saw, were hers. She bowed her head, every bone shouting defeat. She had, he thought, expected it to go like this.
He realized he was still holding Winona. It took two tries to re pocket the weapon. "Good try, Sputnik. Just - no." He hesitated in the doorway. "And don't mention it to Aeryn, either." Rain was starting to fall, a ragged drumbeat on the ramp. "You can stay tonight." He owed Chiana that, at least.
Her voice stopped him with one boot on the ramp. "The Peacekeepers still want Officer Sun. For execution - treason and collaboration with the enemy. Her, they'll never stop searching for." Her voice dropped, became persuasive. "There's a place for her, and the child, if you bring them with you. A good place, a safe place."
He didn't even look back. "She has a place. Here. With me."
II. Aeryn Rising
The sand rasped beneath Crichton's boots as he crested the dune. Shrugging the long cloak closer around himself, Crichton sat, back to the sunset. The wind moaned past him and tugged at the worn leather. The weak and lonely sound of the fading wind made the hairs rise on his nape and forearms, as it did every evening. The sensation was part of the dusk, like the way the temperature fell and the zoon rising and stretching their long legs one by one. Every day the same, but it still gave him the creeps.
The clouds on the horizon kept thinning. The high wispy mare's tail formation had crept up to cover a quarter of the broad colorless iron sky by late afternoon; the clouds had been fading ever since as the advancing front stalled and wheeled south. Crichton shifted his seat in the sand again, easing thigh muscles left aching by the day's ride. Rygel had been keeping a record - disgruntled and vitriolic - of their journey; he'd have to ask the Hynerian how many days it had been. The flat water bottle pressed against his side as he shifted, but he did not pull it out. It would not be long now. The day camp below was still quiet but the hobbled zoon were awake and shuffling about, nosing at thorn bushes and dry stones.
The grey expanse of the horizon before him faded slowly, matching the disappearance of the emerald and topaz razor line behind as the star set for the evening. Overhead, the sky faded from iron to indigo and then to ebony - a nightscape as clear and brilliant as the wide windows on Moya's observation deck. Stars began to wink into sight one by one and then whole clusters at a time. Crichton leaned back and watched them, drawing pictures with a blunt finger. That was the throne sled, there, and there Lo'la, and that was a Prowler in flight...
He stopped and let the hand fall. The clouds had cleared entirely. The whole dome of heaven shone overhead, the light of the brightest ones fluttering as it passed through atmosphere. Low, low on the edge of the world, an amber pinprick flickered in and out of sight.
He squinted and then shut his eyes. Inhaling deeply, slowly, he counted breaths. One, two, three...forty-two, forty-three...sixty-eight, sixty-nine...eighty-six, eighty-seven...ninety-nine, one hundred. He opened his eyes.
There. The amber glow sat steady and strong, a thumbnail's breath above the horizon.
It seemed years since he had named that star, and set it at the center of all his charts. Long enough that he could find it, every night, as well as he could find his hands in the darkness. Long enough that it was still his lodestone.
Despite everything, he grinned, wind-burned face cracking and aching as he laughed to himself. Then he rose to his feet and made his way deliberately down the dune face, his heels gorging long furrows in the sand.
"Hey! Big D! Rise and shine, time to hit the road." D'Argo groaned and rolled over, one hand going to the hilt of his sword even as his eyes opened. "You too, grandma. Up and at'em.," Crichton walked straight through the knot of stirring figures, tapping one bedroll after another. The heap of gauzy veils trembled as Noranti climbed to her feet and shook her clothing out. "Grandma! Watch the sand!"
"Watch yourself, you bellowing yotz." The shortest pile of blankets had not yet moved. Crichton ignored the bitter tone and nudged the Hynerian with his boot again, less gently this time. His toe hit something other than yielding amphibian - something that clinked and rattled.
"Sparky! Are you sleeping with the gold again?" He reached down and jerked the covers back. Rygel snapped flat teeth at him and snatched the blankets back, but not fast enough to cover the saddlebags spilling out from under his ground mat. "What did I tell you about that stuff? It. Is not. Yours!"
"Someone has to keep a watch over it! Anything could happen to it, while you're out gathering starbeams and the rest of us are trying to get some rest!"
D'Argo stalked over, irritation and amusement warring in his stance. "Rygel, that's ridiculous. Who's going to steal the gold -"
"- and the jewels," Crichton put in, dragging out a second set of leather sacks.
"And the jewels, all the way out here? And no, you do not need to count it again tonight!" Ignoring the Hynerian's protests, D'Argo heaved the larger saddlebag over one shoulder and marched away. Crichton followed after, collecting his rolled sleepsack as he went. He carried it to the waiting zoon, who sat in a ragged line, thick necks waving. Noranti darted from one to the next, tying down their baggage, light loads even with the extra water. The zoon protested in their low, drawn out groans, echoing the wind and setting Crichton to gooseflesh again.
D'Argo heaved the saddlebags over the back of his big bull and began to tighten the harness straps. "I do not know why we had to bring him along."
"Beats me, D'Argo. I thought three was plenty, myself. Rygel, get your ass over here, we're leaving."
"Four is required," Noranti said, clinging to her zoon as it unfolded six double-jointed legs and stood. The rocking motion dislodged three of her multitude of veils. Noranti caught two of them as they tumbled past. The third unfolded as it fell and spread into a patch of shadow on the moon-pale sand.
Crichton walked over and retrieved it. "Required how?" he asked, bouncing the weightless fabric in his hand. D'Argo picked up Rygel and threw him in the direction of the smallest zoon's saddle. The startled mount tossed his head and abruptly came to its feet, Rygel barely clinging to the beast and cursing the Luxan in a gasping stream of sound. D'Argo took one pack zoon's lead and tossed the other to Crichton. He caught the rope in one hand and clambered onto his own mount before clicking it into rising.
"Four for the journey," the old woman said, pulling the veils free of her third eye. "Thank you, my dear," as Crichton reined close enough to hand over the veil. She went on, finger moving as she spoke. "Warrior, leader, sage -" the finger pointed at herself and Crichton hid a smile as D'Argo, unseen behind Noranti, rolled his eyes starward.
" - and clown. All are required."
Crichton shook his head and turned his zoon west. "Old woman, that's not how I heard the story goes."
III. Belly of the Beast
When the far-off rumble began again, Crichton was waiting for it, staring across his damp cavern at the far, unseen, wall.
The darkness was warm and thick as honey syrup, and redundant with musk and the green smell of sea-side moss. Crichton kept expecting the smell to fade away, but it persisted, just as his eyes never fully adjusted to the dim ruby light. The cavern walls had a sort of phosphorescence living deep within. It glowed brightest at the water's edge, and for half a meter down, but the light was never enough to let his vision focus, even when the raft floated close enough to the walls to touch.
Harvey was the only thing he could see clearly. The neural clone had a trick of standing out in stark relief against the damp walls, no matter how dim the phosphorescence became.
"Because I'm not really here, John." Except for those times the clone decided to speak as a disembodied voice hovering in the air. Crichton took a deep breath, shut his eyes, and laid back down on the thick mat of kelp.
"Of course you're not really here. If you were real, I could smell your moldy rubber suit."
He'd read that some where, in a review article on isolation dementia, during the long months prepping the Farscape module for launch. That patients had reported sights and sounds and even textures - a silken hank of hair, a wool coat - but no one had ever reported a hallucination that smelled real.
So long as Harvey didn't start giving off a smell, Crichton figured he was safe. Only partly crazy. Even the way the raft shifted under Harvey's phantom weight didn't bother him.
"Denial is such a limiting response, John."
"Limits are all I got right now, Harv. Let me enjoy them while I can."
The clone didn't respond. In the near silence that followed, Crichton became aware of a deep sound, slowly rising in timber and octave. The low patter of wavelets against the tattered edges of the raft increased as well, until the whole of the raft was shuddering in time with the water.
Had the raft been fashioned of crossbeams, instead of braided and re-woven kelp, the wood would have hummed in sympathy with the growing sound, until it shook the wood into a rattling jolt that bounced Crichton's head like a basketball.
But his raft was little more than a bundle of bullrushes, so Crichton lay back and let the raft tremble around him like the Magic Fingers at a fleabag motel.
The passing rumble of semis, the red glow off the walls, the shuddering bed beneath him - "Heck, Harv, I could be back in undergrad, stopping in the Motel 6 off I-75 on the way to Jacksonville for spring break. Just like old times."
"Time is a very important concept, John. You should mind it better."
If I lift my head, Crichton thought wearily, I'll see him sitting there, feet in the water. And like that, the picture clicked into place in his mind - Harvey in a ragged straw hat, with worn overhauls over his cooling suit, a cane pole in his hands and his head cocked back, peering up at the sun to judge the hour.
The dock was firm and sunlight-hot under Crichton's shoulder blades, but still quaking. He could hear, fading from the near distance, an outboard motor, racing away and leaving only the rhythmic slap of wake against the pilings.
Harvey's red and yellow bobber lay despondent on the river's surface, not even bobbing with the ripples.
"Oh, Tom, if Huck could only see you now..." He snickered, the last of the tremors shuddering the sound into a rattling giggle. "Tell me, Harvey - what time is it?"
"It is not yet the appointed hour, John."
And like that the illusion broke, and Crichton was back in the darkness, with only Harvey's voice to keep him company. He sighed, rubbed his hands over his face. "No clocks. No clocks, no chimes, no digital readouts. No candles, no bowl for a waterwheel, no sundials. No sunrise, no sunset. And still you think you can keep track of time."
Impossible to tell in the darkness, but only a smile would give that smug layer to Harvey's voice. "I do, yes. Tell me, do you have anything to eat?"
"Three fish. And I'm not sharing." He shifted on the raft until his feet overhung the edge, dangling in the dark water. The liquid was lukewarm on his bare skin, and closed over his pale toes as if swallowing them whole.
Another day trapped in this...hole, and Crichton might be tempted to eat his own toes as well. There was nothing remotely edible here, save the emergency rats that were still locked in the module.
Nothing to eat, his belly grinding away like an empty polishing drum, and Harvey expected him to provide substance out of the air. Go fish, Crichton thought.
"That's hardly a charitable attitude."
It was ridiculous to curse at a mental delusion for reading your mind. "Well, Granny always said charity begins at home."
A long pause, while the last of the lapping ripples faded away. Finally, Harvey broke. "And so...?"
Crichton grinned at the darkness. "So when I get back home, I'll start being charitable."
"Perhaps you should practice here, in the event that this becomes your home."
"This. Is. Not. Home." The walls, when Crichton had hand-paddled the raft over to the cavern's side, had been soft, spongy, and yielding. They absorbed blows as well as they muffled sound - it took some effort to get an echo going, despite the relatively short distance.
homehomehome faded away, and Crichton started again, this time in a more level voice.
"This is a dank, damp, disgusting piece of gastrointestinal real estate that we - that I have fallen into by mistake, and I am getting out of here just as soon as that -" He made a gesture vaguely towards the Peacekeeper Command Carrier's suspected location, somewhere outside the asteroid belt that was their gargantuan host's native environment - "Imperial Star Destroyer goes away." He let the hand fall. "And I get the module dried out, so the controls work."
"Would it help if I got out and pushed?"
"Cut that out." Crichton hated it when Harvey did that. "I'm the only one who can use geek pop culture quotes around here." If he looked over at Harvey now, the neural clone would be sporting a pair of cinnamon roll headphones.
"I'm only trying to help, John."
"Don't. Just shut up and let me figure out how to get us home."
"Will you take me to Earth, then?"
"That - that wasn't what I meant, Harvey. I meant, get us out of here."
"Ah. I thought you meant -"
Crichton rubbed his hands over his face. "Just, shut up, okay?" And, for once, the clone obliged him.
Home. Home was... Home is Earth, Crichton thought, with gritted teeth. The house in Cocoa Beach. Or the two-story brick house, the one with the fireplace, in South Carolina, where Dad had been stationed two tours in a row.
Why, when he said home, did he never think of that cramped apartment in Houston, where he and DK had spent three years of their lives scribbling equations and penciling models on takeout napkins? Not his first place since college, but it had been where he'd lived, slept, bedded a scant handful of women. But he couldn't even remember the wallpaper now.
Not like the way he could picture Moya's golden walls.
Moya was... familiar, that was it. More familiar than anything else in this mess of an alien quadrant. He'd spent enough time there - in the chamber he'd picked as his own, even though Sparky wandered in and out. The observation deck, with all of the universe spread before Moya. Or the cargo bay, where he stowed Farscape 1, with the crates arranged so he could work on the module at the same time that Aeryn pulled the aft propulsion regulator out of her Prowler. If he'd had a nickel for every time she'd taken that system apart and spread it across the deck, threatening the DRDs with the seating lever if they even came close...
That might have been home. Might become home, working with Aeryn, instead of fighting with her, with the rest of them.
"John."
He was sitting with his eyes closed, the darkness behind his eyelids friendlier than the reddish glow beyond them. Without turning his head, he said, "What."
"The module is resurfacing."
"Wha - where?" On hands and knees, he scrambled to the other side of the raft, peering down through the opaque liquid. "Where?" The module drifted, or the floor of the cavern shifted, or something, because each time it had appeared, it had been in a different position. Including, infuriatingly, once when it had surfaced belly-up, hatch pressed down into the shallow murk, and there had been nothing he could do except curse and wait for the waters to rise again.
And, damnit, he had lost track of the time. First the rumbling roar, then a wait, and then the cavern would shift, become shallower, and bring the raft down to the level of the module. And then -
"There! Yes!" A scattered pattern of lights, with the pale tail fin breaking the surface. "Yes! It held!" He fisted one hand, pounded on the kelp raft. "The seals held!"
Three tries, not including the lost time while the module lay upside-down, to get the canopy rails clean and the canopy frame popped back into shape. Each time, he'd had to bail the module out again, with his hands and a ration pouch. And each time, he'd seen the power levels sink lower and lower.
"Very good, John." Crichton ignored Harvey and slid off the raft into the now waist- deep liquid. "Don't let yourself become over-confident."
"Nobody likes a doubting Thomas, Harv." He sloshed the last yard and laid a hand on the hatch control. Please work, please work, he said silently, and jerked the handle out.
For a heartbeat, it stalled, servos whining, and then the canopy began to creep open. Power source still operational. "We are cooking with Crisco now, baby."
Inside the module, it stank worse - the couch was soaked and a film of dark water still rocking around the inside of the pilot compartment. He ignored that, as he did the signs of dampness in the analog dials. Side dressing. The real problem was internal.
"Is it functional?"
He ignored Harvey in favor of opening the right hand panel. "Damnit. Still soaked," he said, eyeing the dripping board. Power would arc like a lightning storm in that mess, and fuse the whole guidance system, leaving him with only fast and faster as his options. "Have to get it aired out."
"In this 'dank pit'? Your tenacity astonishes me, John. You actually think you can get yourself free."
"Bootstrap levitation. Works every time."
You haven't been very successful at freeing yourself thus far, John."
"Give me time, Harvey. Give. Me -" he grunted, tugging the raft closer - "Time. I'll get it all worked out."
"Surely you don't intend to attempt to have the module join you on the raft."
"Either that, or leave it back down here when the water rises again." As it would - the sound, the water dropping, the water rising, and then...well, he'd handle that part when it came.
First things first - he had to keep the module's hatch above water.
And for that, he had Mother Nature.
He'd lost track of the hours, down here in the darkness with Harvey. The asteroid beast had gulped the module down like a fly, trapping Crichton in its kilometers-long digestive track. Typically of his luck, he'd no sooner landed the module than the monster had belched, and swamped the module in a slurry of stomach contents. But the beast's slow digestion gave him time - time to go mad, listening to Harvey chatter, but time to plan.
And go a-gathering, among the flora that lived in the beast's stomach.
There wasn't anything he'd try to eat, but there were tons of something very like seaweed, that used buoyant pods to drag meters of trunks and fibers across the cavern.
Not as good as Tarzan's vines, but close.
"You are simply delaying the inevitable, John." Of all times, Harvey choose now to become visible, perching on the module's starboard wing, which obligingly tilted a fraction, as if the neural clone actually possessed mass. "The water will rise, the fire will come, and you'll be no better off than you were before. Why not use the module's power to send a message of surrender to the Command Carrier?"
"You just don't get it, Harvey. I'm not giving up to Crais, to you, or anyone else. My life, I make the rules." He grunted, tugging another clump of buoyant seaweed under the module's nose, and making a knot over the emblem that said ISAS.
"The water's rising."
"I know, I know..." He worked faster, ignoring the water lapping at his armpits. "There." He dragged himself out of the water and onto the raft. If he sat in the right spot, he could lean into the module without slopping more water in. He wrung his shirt out and used it to mop out the compartment. Squeeze, mop, squeeze mop. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Run, hide, fight with Aeryn, run, hide, fight with Aeryn. Same old, same old. He swiped at his eyes, at the sweat dripping into them. When he sat up, his knees braced on either side of the hatch, his vision swam.
"What are you doing, John?"
"Just - just resting. Just for a minute."
He sank down, just for a minute, need to take a break. The raft, held by the tight hawser holding the module, didn't even rock as he moved to the edge. Just need to set things down. I'll get cracking again in a minute. He rubbed his eyes, blinked as the module started to descend.
Harvey waved at him from the pilot's couch. Crichton waved back. Decent guy, Harv. Shame to lose him like this, going down for the third time. The water closed over the top of the module, but the LED markings on the panel cut through the murk. Crichton stretched out across the sodden kelp and laid his cheek against the mat, the better to follow the lights of the module as it descended.
Harvey's hand still waved, a metronome measured in the blink-blink-blink of the scarlet power supply indicator as the clone's hand obscured the light and then moved away again.
A real home-coming queen, Crichton thought, and the thought of Harvey in pink crepe nearly sent him into a fit of giggles.
"Oh, god." He rolled over onto his back, his flopping arm coming to rest against the module's side. Why is the module still here? he thought muzzily, and then, The air's going bad.
The air's going bad.
The air's going bad. Time for a -
The rumbling shudder set the raft to rocking back and forth, pitching under Crichton like a jet in a heavy downdraft, and he had to roll twice before he found the edge and fell off, the dark water closing instantly overhead. One hand found a trailing kelp trunk and closed around it. He tugged, pulled himself back to the raft, his soaked head breaking the surface -
- just as the fireball poured into the cavern, a methane-fed scarlet and gold monster that sucked the moisture out of the air, the cavern walls, and the kelp raft. Crichton shoved back under water, the explosion clear even through a foot of tea-stained water. Then it faded, as swiftly as it had come, and he pulled himself out of the water again.
The module was, if anything, riding even higher. Crichton coughed, spat, coughed again. His head was already beginning to clear - the fireball used up oxygen as well as methane, but the walls of the cavern, shocked into life by the flare of heat and light, had burst into life, sprouting hundred of buds and blossoms, the petals lined in eerie phosphorescence Up at the roof of the cavern, some were already letting clouds of pollen drift down.
Crichton hauled himself up and stuck his head into the module's still open compartment. The metal hissed when he dripped on it, the whole couch steamed, but the control panels...
Dry, every last one of them.
He flung himself into the seat and began the power-up sequence. If he could get power up, Farscape would break free of her kelp tethers as if they were a spider's web. If, if, if...
"Glory ha-lee-you-LA!" Propulsion, yes, maneuver, yes. Pitch, yaw...roll. Yes. He stuck his head out of the capsule.
"Harvey! Get in here!" Green across the board, except the port heat shielding and damn if he was going to let that bother him right now. Crichton glanced away from the controls. Still no sight or sound of the neural clone. He swiped at the controls, locked the board and heaved himself half out of the module.
"Harvey! Get your ass in here! This coaster's about to roll!"
The air beat faintly against his face. The water patted against the cavern walls.
There was nothing else.
The beast groaned again, the module lurching under Crichton. He snatched at the rim of the module as it tilted, threatening to dump him from the seat. Then it was tilting the other way, and he slammed the canopy down, hammered the catch home, and thumbed the throttle all the way up.
The module wobbled once as it flung itself into the air, then leveled out. Crichton aimed the nose at the patch of starfield, suddenly straight ahead, and gunned for home.
IV. All The World
Gulls soared back and forth across the interface of ice, sea and sky, monochrome flecks against the turquoise sea, pale ash ice and periwinkle sky. Here and there a high-altitude cloud lay against the blue - thumbprint smudges in whitewash over an azure bowl. The sky's color deepened as the eye climbed to meridian, reaching a shade just short of lapis lazuli.
The murmur of the waves rose up the face of the ice, a constant, edgy rasp of hungry water, eating away at the wall's foundation. At the crest, an easy stone's throw from the sharp edge of the cliff, John Crichton knelt on the glacier and felt the cold seep into his bones.
The ice beneath him was millennia old - laid, snowflake by snowflake, over a thousand winters - and moving with a speed that made the crumbling of granite into quicksilver haste. John took a deep breath of the frigid air and let it out in a cloud of mist. Another few molecules of moisture, falling to join the glacier scant decades before it fractured into the sea.
The voice behind him broke into his thoughts. "You still out here, son?"
John did not turn to look at his father, or the trail that led back to the NES #25 shelter. Jack's boots scuffed the glacier, crusted snow crackling underfoot. John followed the sound without moving to face his visitor. Instead, with gloved fingers, he gathered up a handful of snow. In this cold, it was granular, silicon rough between his hands. He turned his fist over and let it fall, white powder falling through his fingers, opal glints sparkling in the bright sunlight. Beside him, the DTR sat like a squat black gnome. Its warning lights flickered up to gold, then snapped back to a steady, reassuring green.
Jack crunched closer, stopping just behind John's shoulder. "Now, isn't that a sight to see?"
Before them, the glacier dropped away, a hundred meters straight down to the sea. From this angle, neither man could see the icewall sink into the shifting breakers. On the horizon, the sky was nearly the color of ice, deepening as it arced overhead.
"You remember what it was like, son? Up there, where the earth fell away and let the night in? Where the universe begins..." His voice trailed away.
A deep groan overlay the end of his words. John turned his head to the right, listening, his eyes on the DTR. A swarm of readings flowed across the ice-flecked screen and half the indicators jumped to mid-amber levels. The rumble grew louder, reaching a crescendo and falling away again in a hissing roar as a piece of the icefield half Moya's length broke away, leaping for the sea. The dull boom of impact throbbed through the glacier and the hollow spaces in John's bones. He realized abruptly that Jack was staring at his face and looked back out at the sea again.
When the sound of the waves returned, Jack resumed.
"Your mother was so damned proud of you, you know that, don't you? Every time we had people over, she'd pull that picture down. 'This is my son. He's an astronaut.' So proud of you, heading up there in space, working on Farscape." John's fingers rubbed together, the kinetic memory of a three-stranded ring still sharp in his memory.
"You miss it, don't you? Out there among strange suns for years - years," Jack repeated, amazement and something like grudging respect in his voice. A gull wheeled overhead, voice full of grievances and unheeded complaints. "You can have it again. It doesn't have to be like this."
"Yes, it does."
Now it was his father's turn for silence. John grinned down at his handful of snow, still light powder in his open hand. Then the smile faded and he clenched the black glove. When he opened his fist, the compacted lump clung to the leather, then dropped to the driftcrust. On impact, it shattered again, dissolving into powder.
"John, this isn't the time for snap judgments; this Fleet, this alien fleet -"
"Scarrens, Dad. Scarrens. Heat loving, heat producing. The other things they love and make are hate and death."
"ISAS needs you, needs you to talk to them about this Scorpios and these defensive steps he's proposing."
"ISAS can bite me. So can Scorpius. I've dealt with his shit for eight years. I don't want to talk to him anymore."
"John, they need you -"
"They killed them." John dusted his gloves on his knees and rose. "Dad, they killed them. All of them. Rygel, Chiana, D'Argo, Sikozu, A-" His voice cracked. John took a deep breath and went on. "Aeryn. Even Pilot and Moya."
"That was not our fault. We were not responsible for that crash -"
"You were going to put chains back on Moya. After everything I said. Were you really surprised when Pilot decided to spread them both against the Moon instead?" He turned and faced his father. Jack would not meet his eyes. Instead, his gaze kept sliding aside, focusing on John's face. On the scars. John raised a hand and ran gloved fingers over the ridges. "Or were you just surprised," he said softly, "that I lived through it?"
Jack's lips thinned. Finally he brought his eyes to meet his son's. "No. That never surprised me."
John turned back to the sea. "Then don't act shocked when I tell you to deal with Scorpius yourself."
"DK says that crash is what pointed that fleet - the Scarren Fleet - towards Earth. He say the whole story was a hoax, that you just turned us over to them."
"What do you think?"
The gulls continued to whirl and dive past them. Far off, among the drifting icebergs, a whale breached, blowing a vee of spume into the air.
Jack didn't answer. A second whale, or the first one again, breached.
"If you won't help us..." Jack's voice trailed off.
"What? They're going to come down here and arrest me? Who? Antarctica's still international territory."
"The UN's claiming jurisdiction. They're sending -"
John cut him off. "I won't be here when they get here."
He expected his father to protest, to drag out rationalities, justifications, enticements. Instead, Jack asked, "Where will you go?"
John waved his left hand, vaguely eastward. "Out there. Some place. Until the Scarrens come."
"And then?"
John shrugged. "Whatever happens, I don't think it'll kill me."
He kept his eyes on the horizon, long after his father's footsteps had faded away.
V. Halter Rope
Smoke lies thick and low in the city, soaks deep into the shells of warehouses and boarded-up factories. Pedestrians jostle together on the walkways, so thickly that their footfalls echo louder than the distant rumble of launching spacecraft. Sound travels strangely in the smog, muffled by the ground-cover and absorbed by walls saturated with pollution cycles past. Crichton hacks, coughs again as the oil-heavy vapor coats his mouth. The closest Sebaceans glance at him and edge away, but the press of the crowd keeps them all hemmed in together.
The faces that walk past Crichton move in and out the smoke like ghosts. Dark eyes stare from pale faces, tense and hard. The city could be Glasgow, or Chicago, or Minsk, he thinks, some hard northern port town in a bad winter. It could be shift change at the docks, half the city returning to another twelve hours of grime and aching backs, the other half heading for a brew and a smoke and the jangle of tinny jukebox strings.
But this is not Earth. This is not the human homeworld, but one of the last PK-allied planets in non-Scarren space. The faces that keep sliding past him, hooded and exhausted, have reason to look concerned.
The people crowd closer in, and Crichton hears China mew behind him, soft and terrified. His hand starts to slip from hers and they both tighten their grips. He'll have nail marks - little half-moons carved into the back of his hand and above his wrist where the other hand clings. She wears a cloak, the hood pulled so low over her thistledown hair that Crichton can not even see the tip of her nose beneath the fabric. No matter. Chiana's eyes have gone to milk-glass again, and it is only the chain-tight grip she has on him that keeps her upright and moving.
There are no more PK-allied planets in Scarren space. There are damn few Sebaceans still breathing in Scarren space. As the Scarrens pushed further and further in, the list of planets suitable for evasion has shortened considerably.
They had been on-world less than three days. Fifteen arns ago, these people were shown a recording of the Scarren landing at Moc Yld. Ten hours ago, a rumor swept the city - Scarrens on the way, Scarren fleet pushing on, cutting through the Peacekeeper lines like a hand through mist. Scarrens spies - turncoat infiltrators - already on-world.
Nine hours ago, the local cops had came to the sleephouse and beat in their door.
Crichton had been asleep. Dozing in a hunter's restless way, crawling out of dreams and breaching the surface of consciousness. Taking a deep breath of the waking world - unwashed clothes, cold pre-cast plastiform building, unwashed Nebari pressing close against his back, the hundred or so tenants who had slept in the same bedding before them - then sliding back under, when neither sound nor scent warned of an intruder. In those dreams, Aeryn had been saying goodbye. She had turned away from him, back ramrod straight and feet light on Moya's deck. One hand on the Prowler's canopy, she had stopped, and came back to him, face still stern but eyes clear and free of pain. One after the other, her hands had cupped his face and drew him down to met her lips and tongue and hungry mouth. Kissing him cool and soft and sweet, the way he had always thought she would kiss him.
Aeryn's hands had slipped from his neck to his shoulders, trailing down his arms, when Chiana hit him again.
"Crichton! Wake up, you frelling dren!" Hissing and trembling, her voice was so thick with fear Crichton's sleep-clotted brain could not strain the sound into words. Scrabbling the dark, she was collecting their things, stuffing blankets and half-full food packs together in their shoulder bags.
"Pip? Wha-what are you doing?" They had paid for the room until daylight. Goddamn highway robbery, but it was the last sleephouse in the sector, and Chiana had bitched when he'd suggested they find a warm grate.
Now she knelt on the filthy floor, one arm in her jacket, the other sweeping their belongings into a tumbled heap. Chiana's movements were uncoordinated, fumbling, hands groping across the floor and sliding straight past the pack of food cubes at her knee.
"Chiana! What are you doing?"
The low growl of a landhover rose over the last of his words, and Chiana lifted her eyes to meet his as a spotlight stabbed through the window, dragging the shadow of the window frame across the far wall as the light passes.
In the sudden glare, Chiana's eyes been dull and snow-shrouded.
"They're coming - now, with guns, they think we're with the Scarrens, they're going to - you'll die, Crichton, you'll die." Three minutes later, a second 'hover joined the second, but this time Crichton saw it from the end of the block, both bags in one hand and Chiana, blind and stumbling, clinging to the other.
Now dusk has fallen again, and they have nearly circled the entire landing field, only to be turned back again and again by barricades and dark-helmeted Peacekeepers. Since noon, the streets have grown more crowded, with every turn more congested than the last. There are weapons among the crowd now, carried openly despite the
He stops so fast Chiana runs into him and nearly sends him sprawling. He catches himself on the shoulders of the faceless strangers before him. Ahead, he can see the gleam of PK helmets moving briskly down the street.
"Make way! Make way!"
It is a prisoner escort, he realizes. Frank idiocy to have the group dismounted, their prize stumbling along in plain view. Already the crowd is muttering amongst itself, an ugly sound that carries through the mist, more felt than heard.
"Traitor! Spy! Scarren scum!"
He tugs at Chiana's hand, tries to push against the press of bodies. But the crowd is surging forward now, carrying the human and the Nebari with it.
"Kill the traitor!" It is a single voice, but it rises over the muttering tide. And the voice of the crowd surges with it.
The guards move faster, shoving their way through, dragging their cloaked prisoner with them. The captive is as heavily hooded as Chiana and, Crichton realizes, even more unsteady on his feet. The manaculed figure stumbles, staggers drunkenly. Crichton is too slow to come out of his path. Half-raised hands clutch at Crichton's robes. With his free hand, Crichton shoves at the prisoner, but the hands grip tightly and pull him close, so close he can see beneath the hood.
The face that stares back at him - battered, wheezing, as blind as Chiana - is Scorpius.
Crichton feels his mouth fall open, knows that shock is there on his face for anyone to see. Anyone, save the one face to face with him now.
It is a death mask - cadaverous, the bones standing out starkly beneath the bruised skin. One eye is swollen shut, the other is a gorged-out pit. A blood trail marks the edge of Scorpius's mouth, and breath whistles through broken teeth.
When the half-Scarren stumbles again, he brings both of them to their knees.
Chiana is hissing his name, tugging at his hand. Crichton twists his hand free of Chiana's grip, shoves her away. Two seconds, maybe three. It might be enough. It might.
The guards are already bending over them both as Scorpius's hand comes up, touches Crichton's face. He can feel the heat of the other's flesh, through the tattered glove.
"John," Scorpius murmurs, with his ruin of a mouth. "John," he whispers.
Scorpius's voice is no louder than the hammer of blood in Crichton's ears.
"On your feet, half-breed scum." The guards jerk Scorpius to his feet, drag the halfbreed away from Crichton. Two have Scorpius, unresisting, by the arms. The other four have their weapons pointed out, at the crowd.
The crowd hesitates. The guard closest to Crichton brings his rifle to his shoulder, aiming down the barrel, the muzzle moving smoothly from from target to the next. When the muzzle points at a member of the crowd, that one backs away. So does the next, flinching away from the blaster muzzle and the dark visor behind it.
Crichton flinches, too, feeling the Peacekeeper's unseen eyes focus on him. He scrambles back, half-rising before he trips and goes to his knees again. A foot in the crowd comes down on his hand and he cries out. Before he can stand, a hand grips his shoulder.
"You, there - halt!" Peacekeeper strength. He tenses anyway, on the verge of panic.
His face has been on a million screens across Peacekeeper space, flagged at the highest levels. If there is one being PK High Command wants worse than Scorpios, it is John Crichton.
Then something makes a sound behind him - low and guttural, the sound of a beast coughing, snarling out a curse in a voice no sane being ever spoke.
"Loose! He's loose!" The Peacekeeper guards shout, their voices tumbling over each other, equal parts fear and rage. The hand drops away from Crichton's shoulder as the crowd makes a sound like a mass of started sheep, a hundred bodies shoving themselves away even as the half-dozen guards leap toward the snarling knot that this Scorpius and the two guards that are trying to hold him down. Rifle butts are already swinging.
Crichton scrambles to his feet and dashes after the crowd. Three strides, and he draws even with the last of the fleeing crowd. He risks one look back, but all he can see are the backs of the Peacekeeper guards, and raised rifles.
The press around him is muttering in anger, quickly losing its fear. The sound drowns out the thud of butt strokes, and it is only in Crichton's imagination that he hears a voice call out to him - Run.
Run, John. Run. Live.
Hours later, sunrise gone and forgotten already, Chiana - by some miracle - found alive and unharmed, Crichton lifts his head at the words of a passer-by, voicing a rumor of a ship in orbit, taking on passengers. He struggles to his feet and lifts Chiana to hers. It is only a scrap, but the murmur echoes and re-echoes in his mind, finding another phrase to match it.
Run, John. Live.
###
The End
Rating: PG-13 (Gen with bob content.)
Fandom: Farscape.
Characters: John Crichton, Aeryn Sun, and various other walk-ons.
Summary: There is no ending, there is no beginning, there is no moral, there is no truth, there is nothing recorded for the ages to come. 10,000 words.
Warnings/Spoilers: Assumes knowledge of Season Three. Assumes canon relationships - except when it goes AU. Goes AU at distressingly regular intervals. Contains occasional quasi-religious references of a Christian variety. Title from (most directly) the Octavia E. Butler short story.
Disclaimer/Permissions/Contact: Characters are property of Kemper and Hensen. This is a work of fanfiction. No money is being made and no copyright infringement is intended. Please do not archive without permission - will be archived at Leviathan eventually. Please credit the author if remixing/borrowing original characters. Reviews and feedback (positive, not positive, concrit, pointing out stupid spelling mistakes - all welcome) need neither permission nor notification. Contact the author at hosscheka@yahoo.com.
Author's Note: For kazbaby's "Disneyland on Crack" Farscape Pot Luck Ficathon. Written for Simplystars, who asked for (among other things) "John and Aeryn, after Season 2." With thanks to Searose and Queen Al, who looked at portions of this years ago. And with thanks to Cofax, who cast an eye on the early efforts of a novice ficwriter, and encouraged her to keep going. Errors in all their multitude - including excessive obscurity, Farscapean levels of inaccuracy in biological (and physical) science, and passages that just plain fail to make sense - remain mine.
Author's Note 2: It may interest the reader to note that John Crichton's initials are "J. C." It might enlighten the reader to know that the author used various sequences from the Bible as starting places for these stories. It may amuse to reader to know that, for some years now, this has been the oldest unfinished Farscape story in my WIPs file. When I say that I don't abandon stories, I mean it. Some of them just take longer than others.
Despite the length of time, this is pretty much how I figured the fic to come out from the begining. I hope it appeals to someone-not-the-author as well.
I. Center of the Garden
A wicker basket balanced on one hip and a rough-woven straw hat jammed low over her eyes, Aeryn walked slow and steady over the rough-tilled patch of dirt. John watched her approach from the corner his eye but said nothing; despite her burdens, Aeryn's feet were sure.
John’s were mud-caked and bare. Three nights spent working the wet dirt from his boots had taught him to leave the footwear at the edge of the field. Aeryn had frowned at the drop in hygiene standards, and refused to copy him, saying that she preferred to scrape her boots free of dried mud, rather than her skin. And as John was doing most of the field work, she could afford the time spent boot polishing.
Now, she marched delicately down the row where John labored, stopping beside him to carefully kneel and relinquish the broad basket of transplants.
The narrow-leafed tuber sprouts trembled as the basket shifted, threatening to tumble out. Aeryn passed a warning hand over them, her fingers barely brushing the plants as she tucked them back into the basket.
John hid a smile. The gesture might have appeared maternal, to someone else. To someone who stood out of earshot, not hearing Aeryn Sun mutter under her breath " - and tear all your leaves off." The slips shivered once more and subsided.
Aeryn stood and set both hands in the small of her back. Slowly, elbows jutting out like a strutting crane's wings, she turned in a circle once, then twice again. John stabbed the digging stick into the dirt and leaned on the end, watching Aeryn scan the mountainsides bracketing their valley.
That morning the sun had risen in a sky untouched by cloud or mist. Now, just before noon, colorless puffs dotted the bright blue vault. Solitary handfuls now, the clouds had been slowly increasing in size and number as they crept in from the west, heralding the towering thunderhead they would become before nightfall.
Beneath their shadows, the vermilion forests lay like thick velvet on the mountains. Distance made the tall canopy into a mossy nape, and the rare stone outcropping into a pebble dropped on a bed of lichen. The only road lay on the valley floor - the only sign of civilization a single smoke line rising half a day distant.
When Aeryn's eyes fell on him, he grinned. Her features sharpened into a frown. "What?"
He hid his face against his arms and shook his head. "Nothing. Nothing." Lifting his head again, he cleared his expression and said, "So?"
"So?"
"Was there anyone? Any Scarrens? Any Peacekeeper retrieval squads? Any herds of bantahs?"
She folded her arms. "No. No. And I do not know."
"Trust me, babe, if there had been bantahs you would know it." He straightened and pulled the digging stick free of the earth. "That's the third time you've done that this morning, Aeryn. Something bugging you?"
Reflexively, she scratched at her bare arms. As she moved, the tunic's material stretched tight over her swollen belly. "No, nothing I can define. Just - just a feeling." She let her hands fall, slipping over the pulse pistol as she did.
She wore it in a shoulder harness now. John noted that her hand still went to her hip first. He grunted, levered the stick down with one foot, and kept moving down the row. Another hillock, then a third, and John stopped again.
"Man, it's hot out here." He wiped his face with his shirttail, carefully not looking at Aeryn. She ignored him as well; her face tilted upward, eyes slitted against the light. Finally, he said, "Sun not getting to you, babe?"
"No, I'm fine." Sweat stood out on her arms and collarbones. John cast an eye at the bright sky and set his mouth.
Aeryn's heat tolerance had gradually decreased, even as the days grew warmer. Nothing to be gained from arguing with her to stay out of the sun. Suggesting she could stop guarding their valley or helping him in the field was equally pointless. A solid week of sullen silence, broken by random screaming fights, had led, eventually, to a compromise. John had slung a hammock in the shade beneath the trees uphill of the field. From it Aeryn could watch both the field and the curve of the road, far down the valley. A convenient branch had a hook to hang her pistol. Most days, she could be trusted to retreat to the shade and drowse away the hottest hours of the day.
Today she had been restless - gathering a second and third basket of transplants, fetching more water when the barrel was still a third full, repeatedly walking the perimeter of the cleared field. And always watching the mountainsides.
As she was now, staring at the slopes with a fey expression.
He opened his mouth, on the verge of saying something when Aeryn shook her head and said, "I am going to rest now. Unless you need more infant plants." She turned her head a fraction, the corner of her mouth twitching up.
John shut his mouth, still not sure what he could have said, and shook his head. "No, no, these are plenty."
She nodded, set a hand on his shoulder, and walked away, feet sinking deep in the worked dirt.
He watched her go, until she looked back and caught him watching her. He ducked his head and levered at the stick. The faint thread of her laugh floated back to him, but he did not look up.
Tilling the tuber field and setting the transplant sprouts was easily the hardest work John had ever done. Four days had taught him to find a rhythm and not over-exert himself. Noon came, then passed, with the hottest part of the day still to come. John was nearing the end of the basket when a shadow fell over his hands. He looked up at Aeryn, her eyes focused far down the valley.
"What's up?"
"Didn’t you hear me calling? Someone is approaching. A small ship, low to the surface." She had the rifle that was their single heavy weapon slung across her back and Winona in her off hand.
John didn't waste time looking. Taking the proffered pistol in one hand and snatching up his boots in the other, he followed Aeryn as she jogged up the path to the observation point. Slipping under the camouflaging brush, he knelt beside her and took the bi-lens she passed without a word.
Through the distance viewers, the greens of the forest smote his vision even harder than they did the naked eye. Wincing, he dialed down the contrast and began scanning the road. At their end of the valley, the twists of the river took the two-rut trail in and out of view. Further downstream, the valley opened up and the road ran straight beside the narrow waters. Straight or not, the road was still gravel and dirt, and the low-flying pod trailed a cloud of ivory dust.
"Transport pod," he said, just as Aeryn murmured, "Got them." The rifle’s sniper scope hummed as she tapped in windage adjustment.
"Can you hit them from here? Take them down?"
She grunted and twisted her hips, dragging one knee up to compensate for the bulge of her belly. "Hit, yes. But I can’t promise to bring it down. Cripple, possibly. Unless it’s armored." A fractional adjustment of her elbows. "Do you want me to try?"
In the bi-lens, the pod flew level and straight, at a pace that could almost be
called sedate. John hesitated. Three seasons on this world, and they had seen no one from outside the valley. Even the village tax collector had come up the road on foot.
It was a very quiet corner of a very quiet world. The smoke from a crashed transport pod would rise for a great distance. And the thought of shooting down unidentified travelers still brought a bitter taste to his mouth.
"No." Beside him, Aeryn did not move, but a measure of the tension in her shoulders flowed away. Together they watched as the pod trundled its way up the valley, dipping out of sight and popping back into view. The propulsion whine increased, rose to a piercing screech as the pod passed their position, still hugging the river.
John turned to watch it go, thinking for a heartbeat that the pod would pass them by. Then it banked sharply hammon-ward and circled the tuber field.
"They’re going for a landing," and in Aeryn's voice John heard regret for the lost shot.
"Stay here," he said, but it was wish, not command. She was at his back as he ran back down the trail.
The pod’s VTO jets wailed and the blast kicked up a surprising amount of dust from the damp loam. A mist of sand hissed against the brush even as the exhaust sent the branches wildly tossing. John remained in the leafy concealment, the undergrowth no more hid him from the pod’s sensors than would a coat of Day-Glow orange body paint on a white sand beach. Aeryn crouched behind him, the auto-burst selector lit gold. She shifted position to bring the rifle to bear on the opening ramp. John reached back, finger tips grazing her arm. We could have run, we should have run, he thought. Then the jet whine faded and he heard Aeryn's breath, rasping, winded from the short dash down the hill. Running was no longer an option.
A figure appeared in the entry way. Aeryn's arm moved under John’s fingers. "Hold on," he said, as the figure descended the ramp, and the sun’s yellow light fell across an ivory puffball of hair. One colorless palm shaded grey eyes scanning the forest’s edge.
John rose to his feet and came forward of the brush. "Chiana."
She was already dashing down the ramp, arms wide. John grunted under the impact. He returned the embrace, feeling Chiana's laugh through his ribs.
"Crichton! We found you!" She released him and bounced on her toes at arm’s length. He felt an echoing laugh building up inside him. Chiana held his shoulder with one hand and waved towards the pod with the other. "Sikozu! We found them!"
A second shadow appeared in the entryway, this time with a head of flame. Chiana turned back to John, her delighted grin diminishing a fraction. "We did, didn’t we? Where’s Aeryn?"
Sikozu paced down the ramp, thick-soled boots ringing on the metal panel. Her expression was Sikozu of old - arrogance and trepidation coated with scorn. And beneath that - below the smile and half-bow of welcome - something else. John set Chiana aside. Sikozu, no fool, stopped halfway up the ramp. Chiana looked from one to the other. "Crichton? What’s going on?"
He shook his head, keeping his eyes on Suzuki "Oh, Crichton, don't be like that." Chiana's fingers were soft on his arm, tugging him up the ramp. When he resisted, she let his hand slip from hers and stepped up beside Sikozu.
At her touch, Sikozu let her gaze drop from John’s and turned her face to Chiana. "Crichton. It’s Sikozu. And me." Sikozu's nose trailed along Chiana’s cheek. Her eyes, rising again to John’s, were defiant.
His fingers twitched on Winona's butt grip. Sikozu's gaze flickered to his gun hand and back. And there it was - under the arrogance and the fear hunger. Sikozu wanted something.
"Yes, Crichton. Have you no welcome for old comrades?" He matched her stare from the base of the ramp. He did not know what he would have said, Pip or no Pip, except that Aeryn was suddenly beside him, rifle on her hip.
"Not when they land their craft on this summer’s food supply." Chiana whooped and flung herself at Aeryn. Aeryn swung the rifle aside and hugged Chiana back. John watched Aeryn's entire face crease into a smile as they embraced. Chiana leaned back, her hands on Aeryn’s arms then on her rounded belly.
"Aeryn! You’re as big as a Leviathan! Sikozu - look at this!" Aeryn laughed at Chiana’s expression and reached to welcome Sikozu as well.
And that tilted the balance, despite the look of smug victory Sikozu cast over her shoulder. When Aeryn looked to him, he nodded before she had need to ask. An arn, an afternoon - the tubers could wait.
"Too damn hot out here, why don't you girls come sit with us? Let us show you round the place."
Aeryn led the way back up the trail to the chickee. Chiana tagged close behind, nearly treading on Aeryn's heels and dodging the rifle butt that swung with Aeryn's strides. Sikozu followed at a more moderate pace. Her head swiveled from side to side, drinking in the vermilion growth. He could all but hear the wheels in her head turning, cataloging, comparing, making tentative relationships and preliminary conclusions. If he had never seen the Kalish do this before, he might have thought her lost in the surroundings.
He watched her run a finger over the slick surface of a broad-leaf vine and knew her study to be a sham. Sikozu caught him staring at her and smiled before stretching her legs to catch the others.
At the chickee - a raised, wall-less platform, with a high, palm-thatched roof - Chiana gazed about with amazement at the open walls, a firepit in the yard, a shared pallet on the unfinished log floor.
"And, err...facilities?" Sikozu's face was a study in fascinated abhorrence.
The expression that slipped over her countenance when Aeryn explained the downhill pit was priceless. Chiana clapped her hands and laughed out loud. "Wide open spaces! All that you could want!" Sikozu's smile, when it came, was late, and forced.
Under the chickee's open sided shelter there was little room to entertain guests - their seating was, even after more than a year, little more than their shared bedroll and a scattering of ship-board store-alls. Chiana perched beside Aeryn, a hand constantly on the other woman's shoulder or arm. Sikozu serenely bustled about under Aeryn's direction, fetching the two smallest pots for tea bowls, digging through the largest crate for a stash of ground darkbean. John, coming back with a water skin leaking down his leg, scowled at Aeryn.
"I thought you said we ran out."
She turned guileless eyes to him. "I must have been mistaken. Or you were. We had the package all along."
Among the things scattered from the crate unpacking was the extra pulse pistol cartridge. Aeryn nodded as Chiana spoke, her hands sorting their belongings automatically. Then Aeryn's hand closed on the cartridge.
"John, here," she said, and tossed it under hand. He caught it automatically, and she she went back to her task, setting the rest into a loose heap for Sikozu to toss back into the crate.
There were a number of things in that box. John watched with half an eye as the Kalish repacked folded leather coats, an old orange flightsuit, and a notebook with half the pages still blank. Sikozu's hands ran over it like silk over polished marble, and then she put it resolutely away. Carefully. Under Aeryn's old coat, on top of the rest of the knickknacks - with the rest of the things they had no use for on this world.
A rush of wind made the forest toss, rattled the chickee thatch. He watched them as Aeryn sat with Chiana, pale hands holding Aeryn's sun-touched ones easily. Saw Sikozu's carefully blank expression.
When the Kalish rose to her feet, announcing her intention to visit the ship, John stood with her.
"Mind if I tag along?" He gestured at the ship. "It's been so long since I saw anything with lights and hot water."
"Of course not."
He walked beside her, let her fill the air with chatter about some research she had completed in the year since their last parting. Leviathan migration patterns. Guileless, commonplace. Ordinary.
For all that she had pretended innocence, Sikozu did not cry out when, two steps inside the transport pod, John shoved her against the wall and pulled Winona from his jacket. "Why are you here?" he snarled. "And don't," he said, as she opened her mouth to protest, "feed me some bullshit about a honeymoon trip to see old folks. That's why Chiana's here. Why. Are. You. Here?"
She was tempted to lie to him, and later, he could never decide if she had or not.
"Peacekeeper High Command has sued the Scarrens for peace. They've officially given up on wormhole weapons." She swallowed. "They've terminated the search for you. It's not widely known, but it will be, in half a cycle, or less."
He stared at her. "I don't - so?" His mind was reeling. "Even if the Peacekeepers have given up, there are still enough idiots out there who want my head."
"I came because even if the Peacekeepers have stopped fighting the Scarrens, I haven't. Scorpius has been discredited, High Command is fractured. But I know -" She took a deep breath. "I can provide the resources and the materials. Technicians. Work space. We can produce a wormhole weapon, and force the Scarrens into a peace that lasts more than five cycles."
"No." He stepped back from her, the pulse pistol still in his hand. "No."
"Crichton -"
"I said, no. Don't - don't ask again." His hands were trembling. So, he saw, were hers. She bowed her head, every bone shouting defeat. She had, he thought, expected it to go like this.
He realized he was still holding Winona. It took two tries to re pocket the weapon. "Good try, Sputnik. Just - no." He hesitated in the doorway. "And don't mention it to Aeryn, either." Rain was starting to fall, a ragged drumbeat on the ramp. "You can stay tonight." He owed Chiana that, at least.
Her voice stopped him with one boot on the ramp. "The Peacekeepers still want Officer Sun. For execution - treason and collaboration with the enemy. Her, they'll never stop searching for." Her voice dropped, became persuasive. "There's a place for her, and the child, if you bring them with you. A good place, a safe place."
He didn't even look back. "She has a place. Here. With me."
II. Aeryn Rising
The sand rasped beneath Crichton's boots as he crested the dune. Shrugging the long cloak closer around himself, Crichton sat, back to the sunset. The wind moaned past him and tugged at the worn leather. The weak and lonely sound of the fading wind made the hairs rise on his nape and forearms, as it did every evening. The sensation was part of the dusk, like the way the temperature fell and the zoon rising and stretching their long legs one by one. Every day the same, but it still gave him the creeps.
The clouds on the horizon kept thinning. The high wispy mare's tail formation had crept up to cover a quarter of the broad colorless iron sky by late afternoon; the clouds had been fading ever since as the advancing front stalled and wheeled south. Crichton shifted his seat in the sand again, easing thigh muscles left aching by the day's ride. Rygel had been keeping a record - disgruntled and vitriolic - of their journey; he'd have to ask the Hynerian how many days it had been. The flat water bottle pressed against his side as he shifted, but he did not pull it out. It would not be long now. The day camp below was still quiet but the hobbled zoon were awake and shuffling about, nosing at thorn bushes and dry stones.
The grey expanse of the horizon before him faded slowly, matching the disappearance of the emerald and topaz razor line behind as the star set for the evening. Overhead, the sky faded from iron to indigo and then to ebony - a nightscape as clear and brilliant as the wide windows on Moya's observation deck. Stars began to wink into sight one by one and then whole clusters at a time. Crichton leaned back and watched them, drawing pictures with a blunt finger. That was the throne sled, there, and there Lo'la, and that was a Prowler in flight...
He stopped and let the hand fall. The clouds had cleared entirely. The whole dome of heaven shone overhead, the light of the brightest ones fluttering as it passed through atmosphere. Low, low on the edge of the world, an amber pinprick flickered in and out of sight.
He squinted and then shut his eyes. Inhaling deeply, slowly, he counted breaths. One, two, three...forty-two, forty-three...sixty-eight, sixty-nine...eighty-six, eighty-seven...ninety-nine, one hundred. He opened his eyes.
There. The amber glow sat steady and strong, a thumbnail's breath above the horizon.
It seemed years since he had named that star, and set it at the center of all his charts. Long enough that he could find it, every night, as well as he could find his hands in the darkness. Long enough that it was still his lodestone.
Despite everything, he grinned, wind-burned face cracking and aching as he laughed to himself. Then he rose to his feet and made his way deliberately down the dune face, his heels gorging long furrows in the sand.
"Hey! Big D! Rise and shine, time to hit the road." D'Argo groaned and rolled over, one hand going to the hilt of his sword even as his eyes opened. "You too, grandma. Up and at'em.," Crichton walked straight through the knot of stirring figures, tapping one bedroll after another. The heap of gauzy veils trembled as Noranti climbed to her feet and shook her clothing out. "Grandma! Watch the sand!"
"Watch yourself, you bellowing yotz." The shortest pile of blankets had not yet moved. Crichton ignored the bitter tone and nudged the Hynerian with his boot again, less gently this time. His toe hit something other than yielding amphibian - something that clinked and rattled.
"Sparky! Are you sleeping with the gold again?" He reached down and jerked the covers back. Rygel snapped flat teeth at him and snatched the blankets back, but not fast enough to cover the saddlebags spilling out from under his ground mat. "What did I tell you about that stuff? It. Is not. Yours!"
"Someone has to keep a watch over it! Anything could happen to it, while you're out gathering starbeams and the rest of us are trying to get some rest!"
D'Argo stalked over, irritation and amusement warring in his stance. "Rygel, that's ridiculous. Who's going to steal the gold -"
"- and the jewels," Crichton put in, dragging out a second set of leather sacks.
"And the jewels, all the way out here? And no, you do not need to count it again tonight!" Ignoring the Hynerian's protests, D'Argo heaved the larger saddlebag over one shoulder and marched away. Crichton followed after, collecting his rolled sleepsack as he went. He carried it to the waiting zoon, who sat in a ragged line, thick necks waving. Noranti darted from one to the next, tying down their baggage, light loads even with the extra water. The zoon protested in their low, drawn out groans, echoing the wind and setting Crichton to gooseflesh again.
D'Argo heaved the saddlebags over the back of his big bull and began to tighten the harness straps. "I do not know why we had to bring him along."
"Beats me, D'Argo. I thought three was plenty, myself. Rygel, get your ass over here, we're leaving."
"Four is required," Noranti said, clinging to her zoon as it unfolded six double-jointed legs and stood. The rocking motion dislodged three of her multitude of veils. Noranti caught two of them as they tumbled past. The third unfolded as it fell and spread into a patch of shadow on the moon-pale sand.
Crichton walked over and retrieved it. "Required how?" he asked, bouncing the weightless fabric in his hand. D'Argo picked up Rygel and threw him in the direction of the smallest zoon's saddle. The startled mount tossed his head and abruptly came to its feet, Rygel barely clinging to the beast and cursing the Luxan in a gasping stream of sound. D'Argo took one pack zoon's lead and tossed the other to Crichton. He caught the rope in one hand and clambered onto his own mount before clicking it into rising.
"Four for the journey," the old woman said, pulling the veils free of her third eye. "Thank you, my dear," as Crichton reined close enough to hand over the veil. She went on, finger moving as she spoke. "Warrior, leader, sage -" the finger pointed at herself and Crichton hid a smile as D'Argo, unseen behind Noranti, rolled his eyes starward.
" - and clown. All are required."
Crichton shook his head and turned his zoon west. "Old woman, that's not how I heard the story goes."
III. Belly of the Beast
When the far-off rumble began again, Crichton was waiting for it, staring across his damp cavern at the far, unseen, wall.
The darkness was warm and thick as honey syrup, and redundant with musk and the green smell of sea-side moss. Crichton kept expecting the smell to fade away, but it persisted, just as his eyes never fully adjusted to the dim ruby light. The cavern walls had a sort of phosphorescence living deep within. It glowed brightest at the water's edge, and for half a meter down, but the light was never enough to let his vision focus, even when the raft floated close enough to the walls to touch.
Harvey was the only thing he could see clearly. The neural clone had a trick of standing out in stark relief against the damp walls, no matter how dim the phosphorescence became.
"Because I'm not really here, John." Except for those times the clone decided to speak as a disembodied voice hovering in the air. Crichton took a deep breath, shut his eyes, and laid back down on the thick mat of kelp.
"Of course you're not really here. If you were real, I could smell your moldy rubber suit."
He'd read that some where, in a review article on isolation dementia, during the long months prepping the Farscape module for launch. That patients had reported sights and sounds and even textures - a silken hank of hair, a wool coat - but no one had ever reported a hallucination that smelled real.
So long as Harvey didn't start giving off a smell, Crichton figured he was safe. Only partly crazy. Even the way the raft shifted under Harvey's phantom weight didn't bother him.
"Denial is such a limiting response, John."
"Limits are all I got right now, Harv. Let me enjoy them while I can."
The clone didn't respond. In the near silence that followed, Crichton became aware of a deep sound, slowly rising in timber and octave. The low patter of wavelets against the tattered edges of the raft increased as well, until the whole of the raft was shuddering in time with the water.
Had the raft been fashioned of crossbeams, instead of braided and re-woven kelp, the wood would have hummed in sympathy with the growing sound, until it shook the wood into a rattling jolt that bounced Crichton's head like a basketball.
But his raft was little more than a bundle of bullrushes, so Crichton lay back and let the raft tremble around him like the Magic Fingers at a fleabag motel.
The passing rumble of semis, the red glow off the walls, the shuddering bed beneath him - "Heck, Harv, I could be back in undergrad, stopping in the Motel 6 off I-75 on the way to Jacksonville for spring break. Just like old times."
"Time is a very important concept, John. You should mind it better."
If I lift my head, Crichton thought wearily, I'll see him sitting there, feet in the water. And like that, the picture clicked into place in his mind - Harvey in a ragged straw hat, with worn overhauls over his cooling suit, a cane pole in his hands and his head cocked back, peering up at the sun to judge the hour.
The dock was firm and sunlight-hot under Crichton's shoulder blades, but still quaking. He could hear, fading from the near distance, an outboard motor, racing away and leaving only the rhythmic slap of wake against the pilings.
Harvey's red and yellow bobber lay despondent on the river's surface, not even bobbing with the ripples.
"Oh, Tom, if Huck could only see you now..." He snickered, the last of the tremors shuddering the sound into a rattling giggle. "Tell me, Harvey - what time is it?"
"It is not yet the appointed hour, John."
And like that the illusion broke, and Crichton was back in the darkness, with only Harvey's voice to keep him company. He sighed, rubbed his hands over his face. "No clocks. No clocks, no chimes, no digital readouts. No candles, no bowl for a waterwheel, no sundials. No sunrise, no sunset. And still you think you can keep track of time."
Impossible to tell in the darkness, but only a smile would give that smug layer to Harvey's voice. "I do, yes. Tell me, do you have anything to eat?"
"Three fish. And I'm not sharing." He shifted on the raft until his feet overhung the edge, dangling in the dark water. The liquid was lukewarm on his bare skin, and closed over his pale toes as if swallowing them whole.
Another day trapped in this...hole, and Crichton might be tempted to eat his own toes as well. There was nothing remotely edible here, save the emergency rats that were still locked in the module.
Nothing to eat, his belly grinding away like an empty polishing drum, and Harvey expected him to provide substance out of the air. Go fish, Crichton thought.
"That's hardly a charitable attitude."
It was ridiculous to curse at a mental delusion for reading your mind. "Well, Granny always said charity begins at home."
A long pause, while the last of the lapping ripples faded away. Finally, Harvey broke. "And so...?"
Crichton grinned at the darkness. "So when I get back home, I'll start being charitable."
"Perhaps you should practice here, in the event that this becomes your home."
"This. Is. Not. Home." The walls, when Crichton had hand-paddled the raft over to the cavern's side, had been soft, spongy, and yielding. They absorbed blows as well as they muffled sound - it took some effort to get an echo going, despite the relatively short distance.
homehomehome faded away, and Crichton started again, this time in a more level voice.
"This is a dank, damp, disgusting piece of gastrointestinal real estate that we - that I have fallen into by mistake, and I am getting out of here just as soon as that -" He made a gesture vaguely towards the Peacekeeper Command Carrier's suspected location, somewhere outside the asteroid belt that was their gargantuan host's native environment - "Imperial Star Destroyer goes away." He let the hand fall. "And I get the module dried out, so the controls work."
"Would it help if I got out and pushed?"
"Cut that out." Crichton hated it when Harvey did that. "I'm the only one who can use geek pop culture quotes around here." If he looked over at Harvey now, the neural clone would be sporting a pair of cinnamon roll headphones.
"I'm only trying to help, John."
"Don't. Just shut up and let me figure out how to get us home."
"Will you take me to Earth, then?"
"That - that wasn't what I meant, Harvey. I meant, get us out of here."
"Ah. I thought you meant -"
Crichton rubbed his hands over his face. "Just, shut up, okay?" And, for once, the clone obliged him.
Home. Home was... Home is Earth, Crichton thought, with gritted teeth. The house in Cocoa Beach. Or the two-story brick house, the one with the fireplace, in South Carolina, where Dad had been stationed two tours in a row.
Why, when he said home, did he never think of that cramped apartment in Houston, where he and DK had spent three years of their lives scribbling equations and penciling models on takeout napkins? Not his first place since college, but it had been where he'd lived, slept, bedded a scant handful of women. But he couldn't even remember the wallpaper now.
Not like the way he could picture Moya's golden walls.
Moya was... familiar, that was it. More familiar than anything else in this mess of an alien quadrant. He'd spent enough time there - in the chamber he'd picked as his own, even though Sparky wandered in and out. The observation deck, with all of the universe spread before Moya. Or the cargo bay, where he stowed Farscape 1, with the crates arranged so he could work on the module at the same time that Aeryn pulled the aft propulsion regulator out of her Prowler. If he'd had a nickel for every time she'd taken that system apart and spread it across the deck, threatening the DRDs with the seating lever if they even came close...
That might have been home. Might become home, working with Aeryn, instead of fighting with her, with the rest of them.
"John."
He was sitting with his eyes closed, the darkness behind his eyelids friendlier than the reddish glow beyond them. Without turning his head, he said, "What."
"The module is resurfacing."
"Wha - where?" On hands and knees, he scrambled to the other side of the raft, peering down through the opaque liquid. "Where?" The module drifted, or the floor of the cavern shifted, or something, because each time it had appeared, it had been in a different position. Including, infuriatingly, once when it had surfaced belly-up, hatch pressed down into the shallow murk, and there had been nothing he could do except curse and wait for the waters to rise again.
And, damnit, he had lost track of the time. First the rumbling roar, then a wait, and then the cavern would shift, become shallower, and bring the raft down to the level of the module. And then -
"There! Yes!" A scattered pattern of lights, with the pale tail fin breaking the surface. "Yes! It held!" He fisted one hand, pounded on the kelp raft. "The seals held!"
Three tries, not including the lost time while the module lay upside-down, to get the canopy rails clean and the canopy frame popped back into shape. Each time, he'd had to bail the module out again, with his hands and a ration pouch. And each time, he'd seen the power levels sink lower and lower.
"Very good, John." Crichton ignored Harvey and slid off the raft into the now waist- deep liquid. "Don't let yourself become over-confident."
"Nobody likes a doubting Thomas, Harv." He sloshed the last yard and laid a hand on the hatch control. Please work, please work, he said silently, and jerked the handle out.
For a heartbeat, it stalled, servos whining, and then the canopy began to creep open. Power source still operational. "We are cooking with Crisco now, baby."
Inside the module, it stank worse - the couch was soaked and a film of dark water still rocking around the inside of the pilot compartment. He ignored that, as he did the signs of dampness in the analog dials. Side dressing. The real problem was internal.
"Is it functional?"
He ignored Harvey in favor of opening the right hand panel. "Damnit. Still soaked," he said, eyeing the dripping board. Power would arc like a lightning storm in that mess, and fuse the whole guidance system, leaving him with only fast and faster as his options. "Have to get it aired out."
"In this 'dank pit'? Your tenacity astonishes me, John. You actually think you can get yourself free."
"Bootstrap levitation. Works every time."
You haven't been very successful at freeing yourself thus far, John."
"Give me time, Harvey. Give. Me -" he grunted, tugging the raft closer - "Time. I'll get it all worked out."
"Surely you don't intend to attempt to have the module join you on the raft."
"Either that, or leave it back down here when the water rises again." As it would - the sound, the water dropping, the water rising, and then...well, he'd handle that part when it came.
First things first - he had to keep the module's hatch above water.
And for that, he had Mother Nature.
He'd lost track of the hours, down here in the darkness with Harvey. The asteroid beast had gulped the module down like a fly, trapping Crichton in its kilometers-long digestive track. Typically of his luck, he'd no sooner landed the module than the monster had belched, and swamped the module in a slurry of stomach contents. But the beast's slow digestion gave him time - time to go mad, listening to Harvey chatter, but time to plan.
And go a-gathering, among the flora that lived in the beast's stomach.
There wasn't anything he'd try to eat, but there were tons of something very like seaweed, that used buoyant pods to drag meters of trunks and fibers across the cavern.
Not as good as Tarzan's vines, but close.
"You are simply delaying the inevitable, John." Of all times, Harvey choose now to become visible, perching on the module's starboard wing, which obligingly tilted a fraction, as if the neural clone actually possessed mass. "The water will rise, the fire will come, and you'll be no better off than you were before. Why not use the module's power to send a message of surrender to the Command Carrier?"
"You just don't get it, Harvey. I'm not giving up to Crais, to you, or anyone else. My life, I make the rules." He grunted, tugging another clump of buoyant seaweed under the module's nose, and making a knot over the emblem that said ISAS.
"The water's rising."
"I know, I know..." He worked faster, ignoring the water lapping at his armpits. "There." He dragged himself out of the water and onto the raft. If he sat in the right spot, he could lean into the module without slopping more water in. He wrung his shirt out and used it to mop out the compartment. Squeeze, mop, squeeze mop. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Run, hide, fight with Aeryn, run, hide, fight with Aeryn. Same old, same old. He swiped at his eyes, at the sweat dripping into them. When he sat up, his knees braced on either side of the hatch, his vision swam.
"What are you doing, John?"
"Just - just resting. Just for a minute."
He sank down, just for a minute, need to take a break. The raft, held by the tight hawser holding the module, didn't even rock as he moved to the edge. Just need to set things down. I'll get cracking again in a minute. He rubbed his eyes, blinked as the module started to descend.
Harvey waved at him from the pilot's couch. Crichton waved back. Decent guy, Harv. Shame to lose him like this, going down for the third time. The water closed over the top of the module, but the LED markings on the panel cut through the murk. Crichton stretched out across the sodden kelp and laid his cheek against the mat, the better to follow the lights of the module as it descended.
Harvey's hand still waved, a metronome measured in the blink-blink-blink of the scarlet power supply indicator as the clone's hand obscured the light and then moved away again.
A real home-coming queen, Crichton thought, and the thought of Harvey in pink crepe nearly sent him into a fit of giggles.
"Oh, god." He rolled over onto his back, his flopping arm coming to rest against the module's side. Why is the module still here? he thought muzzily, and then, The air's going bad.
The air's going bad.
The air's going bad. Time for a -
The rumbling shudder set the raft to rocking back and forth, pitching under Crichton like a jet in a heavy downdraft, and he had to roll twice before he found the edge and fell off, the dark water closing instantly overhead. One hand found a trailing kelp trunk and closed around it. He tugged, pulled himself back to the raft, his soaked head breaking the surface -
- just as the fireball poured into the cavern, a methane-fed scarlet and gold monster that sucked the moisture out of the air, the cavern walls, and the kelp raft. Crichton shoved back under water, the explosion clear even through a foot of tea-stained water. Then it faded, as swiftly as it had come, and he pulled himself out of the water again.
The module was, if anything, riding even higher. Crichton coughed, spat, coughed again. His head was already beginning to clear - the fireball used up oxygen as well as methane, but the walls of the cavern, shocked into life by the flare of heat and light, had burst into life, sprouting hundred of buds and blossoms, the petals lined in eerie phosphorescence Up at the roof of the cavern, some were already letting clouds of pollen drift down.
Crichton hauled himself up and stuck his head into the module's still open compartment. The metal hissed when he dripped on it, the whole couch steamed, but the control panels...
Dry, every last one of them.
He flung himself into the seat and began the power-up sequence. If he could get power up, Farscape would break free of her kelp tethers as if they were a spider's web. If, if, if...
"Glory ha-lee-you-LA!" Propulsion, yes, maneuver, yes. Pitch, yaw...roll. Yes. He stuck his head out of the capsule.
"Harvey! Get in here!" Green across the board, except the port heat shielding and damn if he was going to let that bother him right now. Crichton glanced away from the controls. Still no sight or sound of the neural clone. He swiped at the controls, locked the board and heaved himself half out of the module.
"Harvey! Get your ass in here! This coaster's about to roll!"
The air beat faintly against his face. The water patted against the cavern walls.
There was nothing else.
The beast groaned again, the module lurching under Crichton. He snatched at the rim of the module as it tilted, threatening to dump him from the seat. Then it was tilting the other way, and he slammed the canopy down, hammered the catch home, and thumbed the throttle all the way up.
The module wobbled once as it flung itself into the air, then leveled out. Crichton aimed the nose at the patch of starfield, suddenly straight ahead, and gunned for home.
IV. All The World
Gulls soared back and forth across the interface of ice, sea and sky, monochrome flecks against the turquoise sea, pale ash ice and periwinkle sky. Here and there a high-altitude cloud lay against the blue - thumbprint smudges in whitewash over an azure bowl. The sky's color deepened as the eye climbed to meridian, reaching a shade just short of lapis lazuli.
The murmur of the waves rose up the face of the ice, a constant, edgy rasp of hungry water, eating away at the wall's foundation. At the crest, an easy stone's throw from the sharp edge of the cliff, John Crichton knelt on the glacier and felt the cold seep into his bones.
The ice beneath him was millennia old - laid, snowflake by snowflake, over a thousand winters - and moving with a speed that made the crumbling of granite into quicksilver haste. John took a deep breath of the frigid air and let it out in a cloud of mist. Another few molecules of moisture, falling to join the glacier scant decades before it fractured into the sea.
The voice behind him broke into his thoughts. "You still out here, son?"
John did not turn to look at his father, or the trail that led back to the NES #25 shelter. Jack's boots scuffed the glacier, crusted snow crackling underfoot. John followed the sound without moving to face his visitor. Instead, with gloved fingers, he gathered up a handful of snow. In this cold, it was granular, silicon rough between his hands. He turned his fist over and let it fall, white powder falling through his fingers, opal glints sparkling in the bright sunlight. Beside him, the DTR sat like a squat black gnome. Its warning lights flickered up to gold, then snapped back to a steady, reassuring green.
Jack crunched closer, stopping just behind John's shoulder. "Now, isn't that a sight to see?"
Before them, the glacier dropped away, a hundred meters straight down to the sea. From this angle, neither man could see the icewall sink into the shifting breakers. On the horizon, the sky was nearly the color of ice, deepening as it arced overhead.
"You remember what it was like, son? Up there, where the earth fell away and let the night in? Where the universe begins..." His voice trailed away.
A deep groan overlay the end of his words. John turned his head to the right, listening, his eyes on the DTR. A swarm of readings flowed across the ice-flecked screen and half the indicators jumped to mid-amber levels. The rumble grew louder, reaching a crescendo and falling away again in a hissing roar as a piece of the icefield half Moya's length broke away, leaping for the sea. The dull boom of impact throbbed through the glacier and the hollow spaces in John's bones. He realized abruptly that Jack was staring at his face and looked back out at the sea again.
When the sound of the waves returned, Jack resumed.
"Your mother was so damned proud of you, you know that, don't you? Every time we had people over, she'd pull that picture down. 'This is my son. He's an astronaut.' So proud of you, heading up there in space, working on Farscape." John's fingers rubbed together, the kinetic memory of a three-stranded ring still sharp in his memory.
"You miss it, don't you? Out there among strange suns for years - years," Jack repeated, amazement and something like grudging respect in his voice. A gull wheeled overhead, voice full of grievances and unheeded complaints. "You can have it again. It doesn't have to be like this."
"Yes, it does."
Now it was his father's turn for silence. John grinned down at his handful of snow, still light powder in his open hand. Then the smile faded and he clenched the black glove. When he opened his fist, the compacted lump clung to the leather, then dropped to the driftcrust. On impact, it shattered again, dissolving into powder.
"John, this isn't the time for snap judgments; this Fleet, this alien fleet -"
"Scarrens, Dad. Scarrens. Heat loving, heat producing. The other things they love and make are hate and death."
"ISAS needs you, needs you to talk to them about this Scorpios and these defensive steps he's proposing."
"ISAS can bite me. So can Scorpius. I've dealt with his shit for eight years. I don't want to talk to him anymore."
"John, they need you -"
"They killed them." John dusted his gloves on his knees and rose. "Dad, they killed them. All of them. Rygel, Chiana, D'Argo, Sikozu, A-" His voice cracked. John took a deep breath and went on. "Aeryn. Even Pilot and Moya."
"That was not our fault. We were not responsible for that crash -"
"You were going to put chains back on Moya. After everything I said. Were you really surprised when Pilot decided to spread them both against the Moon instead?" He turned and faced his father. Jack would not meet his eyes. Instead, his gaze kept sliding aside, focusing on John's face. On the scars. John raised a hand and ran gloved fingers over the ridges. "Or were you just surprised," he said softly, "that I lived through it?"
Jack's lips thinned. Finally he brought his eyes to meet his son's. "No. That never surprised me."
John turned back to the sea. "Then don't act shocked when I tell you to deal with Scorpius yourself."
"DK says that crash is what pointed that fleet - the Scarren Fleet - towards Earth. He say the whole story was a hoax, that you just turned us over to them."
"What do you think?"
The gulls continued to whirl and dive past them. Far off, among the drifting icebergs, a whale breached, blowing a vee of spume into the air.
Jack didn't answer. A second whale, or the first one again, breached.
"If you won't help us..." Jack's voice trailed off.
"What? They're going to come down here and arrest me? Who? Antarctica's still international territory."
"The UN's claiming jurisdiction. They're sending -"
John cut him off. "I won't be here when they get here."
He expected his father to protest, to drag out rationalities, justifications, enticements. Instead, Jack asked, "Where will you go?"
John waved his left hand, vaguely eastward. "Out there. Some place. Until the Scarrens come."
"And then?"
John shrugged. "Whatever happens, I don't think it'll kill me."
He kept his eyes on the horizon, long after his father's footsteps had faded away.
V. Halter Rope
Smoke lies thick and low in the city, soaks deep into the shells of warehouses and boarded-up factories. Pedestrians jostle together on the walkways, so thickly that their footfalls echo louder than the distant rumble of launching spacecraft. Sound travels strangely in the smog, muffled by the ground-cover and absorbed by walls saturated with pollution cycles past. Crichton hacks, coughs again as the oil-heavy vapor coats his mouth. The closest Sebaceans glance at him and edge away, but the press of the crowd keeps them all hemmed in together.
The faces that walk past Crichton move in and out the smoke like ghosts. Dark eyes stare from pale faces, tense and hard. The city could be Glasgow, or Chicago, or Minsk, he thinks, some hard northern port town in a bad winter. It could be shift change at the docks, half the city returning to another twelve hours of grime and aching backs, the other half heading for a brew and a smoke and the jangle of tinny jukebox strings.
But this is not Earth. This is not the human homeworld, but one of the last PK-allied planets in non-Scarren space. The faces that keep sliding past him, hooded and exhausted, have reason to look concerned.
The people crowd closer in, and Crichton hears China mew behind him, soft and terrified. His hand starts to slip from hers and they both tighten their grips. He'll have nail marks - little half-moons carved into the back of his hand and above his wrist where the other hand clings. She wears a cloak, the hood pulled so low over her thistledown hair that Crichton can not even see the tip of her nose beneath the fabric. No matter. Chiana's eyes have gone to milk-glass again, and it is only the chain-tight grip she has on him that keeps her upright and moving.
There are no more PK-allied planets in Scarren space. There are damn few Sebaceans still breathing in Scarren space. As the Scarrens pushed further and further in, the list of planets suitable for evasion has shortened considerably.
They had been on-world less than three days. Fifteen arns ago, these people were shown a recording of the Scarren landing at Moc Yld. Ten hours ago, a rumor swept the city - Scarrens on the way, Scarren fleet pushing on, cutting through the Peacekeeper lines like a hand through mist. Scarrens spies - turncoat infiltrators - already on-world.
Nine hours ago, the local cops had came to the sleephouse and beat in their door.
Crichton had been asleep. Dozing in a hunter's restless way, crawling out of dreams and breaching the surface of consciousness. Taking a deep breath of the waking world - unwashed clothes, cold pre-cast plastiform building, unwashed Nebari pressing close against his back, the hundred or so tenants who had slept in the same bedding before them - then sliding back under, when neither sound nor scent warned of an intruder. In those dreams, Aeryn had been saying goodbye. She had turned away from him, back ramrod straight and feet light on Moya's deck. One hand on the Prowler's canopy, she had stopped, and came back to him, face still stern but eyes clear and free of pain. One after the other, her hands had cupped his face and drew him down to met her lips and tongue and hungry mouth. Kissing him cool and soft and sweet, the way he had always thought she would kiss him.
Aeryn's hands had slipped from his neck to his shoulders, trailing down his arms, when Chiana hit him again.
"Crichton! Wake up, you frelling dren!" Hissing and trembling, her voice was so thick with fear Crichton's sleep-clotted brain could not strain the sound into words. Scrabbling the dark, she was collecting their things, stuffing blankets and half-full food packs together in their shoulder bags.
"Pip? Wha-what are you doing?" They had paid for the room until daylight. Goddamn highway robbery, but it was the last sleephouse in the sector, and Chiana had bitched when he'd suggested they find a warm grate.
Now she knelt on the filthy floor, one arm in her jacket, the other sweeping their belongings into a tumbled heap. Chiana's movements were uncoordinated, fumbling, hands groping across the floor and sliding straight past the pack of food cubes at her knee.
"Chiana! What are you doing?"
The low growl of a landhover rose over the last of his words, and Chiana lifted her eyes to meet his as a spotlight stabbed through the window, dragging the shadow of the window frame across the far wall as the light passes.
In the sudden glare, Chiana's eyes been dull and snow-shrouded.
"They're coming - now, with guns, they think we're with the Scarrens, they're going to - you'll die, Crichton, you'll die." Three minutes later, a second 'hover joined the second, but this time Crichton saw it from the end of the block, both bags in one hand and Chiana, blind and stumbling, clinging to the other.
Now dusk has fallen again, and they have nearly circled the entire landing field, only to be turned back again and again by barricades and dark-helmeted Peacekeepers. Since noon, the streets have grown more crowded, with every turn more congested than the last. There are weapons among the crowd now, carried openly despite the
He stops so fast Chiana runs into him and nearly sends him sprawling. He catches himself on the shoulders of the faceless strangers before him. Ahead, he can see the gleam of PK helmets moving briskly down the street.
"Make way! Make way!"
It is a prisoner escort, he realizes. Frank idiocy to have the group dismounted, their prize stumbling along in plain view. Already the crowd is muttering amongst itself, an ugly sound that carries through the mist, more felt than heard.
"Traitor! Spy! Scarren scum!"
He tugs at Chiana's hand, tries to push against the press of bodies. But the crowd is surging forward now, carrying the human and the Nebari with it.
"Kill the traitor!" It is a single voice, but it rises over the muttering tide. And the voice of the crowd surges with it.
The guards move faster, shoving their way through, dragging their cloaked prisoner with them. The captive is as heavily hooded as Chiana and, Crichton realizes, even more unsteady on his feet. The manaculed figure stumbles, staggers drunkenly. Crichton is too slow to come out of his path. Half-raised hands clutch at Crichton's robes. With his free hand, Crichton shoves at the prisoner, but the hands grip tightly and pull him close, so close he can see beneath the hood.
The face that stares back at him - battered, wheezing, as blind as Chiana - is Scorpius.
Crichton feels his mouth fall open, knows that shock is there on his face for anyone to see. Anyone, save the one face to face with him now.
It is a death mask - cadaverous, the bones standing out starkly beneath the bruised skin. One eye is swollen shut, the other is a gorged-out pit. A blood trail marks the edge of Scorpius's mouth, and breath whistles through broken teeth.
When the half-Scarren stumbles again, he brings both of them to their knees.
Chiana is hissing his name, tugging at his hand. Crichton twists his hand free of Chiana's grip, shoves her away. Two seconds, maybe three. It might be enough. It might.
The guards are already bending over them both as Scorpius's hand comes up, touches Crichton's face. He can feel the heat of the other's flesh, through the tattered glove.
"John," Scorpius murmurs, with his ruin of a mouth. "John," he whispers.
Scorpius's voice is no louder than the hammer of blood in Crichton's ears.
"On your feet, half-breed scum." The guards jerk Scorpius to his feet, drag the halfbreed away from Crichton. Two have Scorpius, unresisting, by the arms. The other four have their weapons pointed out, at the crowd.
The crowd hesitates. The guard closest to Crichton brings his rifle to his shoulder, aiming down the barrel, the muzzle moving smoothly from from target to the next. When the muzzle points at a member of the crowd, that one backs away. So does the next, flinching away from the blaster muzzle and the dark visor behind it.
Crichton flinches, too, feeling the Peacekeeper's unseen eyes focus on him. He scrambles back, half-rising before he trips and goes to his knees again. A foot in the crowd comes down on his hand and he cries out. Before he can stand, a hand grips his shoulder.
"You, there - halt!" Peacekeeper strength. He tenses anyway, on the verge of panic.
His face has been on a million screens across Peacekeeper space, flagged at the highest levels. If there is one being PK High Command wants worse than Scorpios, it is John Crichton.
Then something makes a sound behind him - low and guttural, the sound of a beast coughing, snarling out a curse in a voice no sane being ever spoke.
"Loose! He's loose!" The Peacekeeper guards shout, their voices tumbling over each other, equal parts fear and rage. The hand drops away from Crichton's shoulder as the crowd makes a sound like a mass of started sheep, a hundred bodies shoving themselves away even as the half-dozen guards leap toward the snarling knot that this Scorpius and the two guards that are trying to hold him down. Rifle butts are already swinging.
Crichton scrambles to his feet and dashes after the crowd. Three strides, and he draws even with the last of the fleeing crowd. He risks one look back, but all he can see are the backs of the Peacekeeper guards, and raised rifles.
The press around him is muttering in anger, quickly losing its fear. The sound drowns out the thud of butt strokes, and it is only in Crichton's imagination that he hears a voice call out to him - Run.
Run, John. Run. Live.
Hours later, sunrise gone and forgotten already, Chiana - by some miracle - found alive and unharmed, Crichton lifts his head at the words of a passer-by, voicing a rumor of a ship in orbit, taking on passengers. He struggles to his feet and lifts Chiana to hers. It is only a scrap, but the murmur echoes and re-echoes in his mind, finding another phrase to match it.
Run, John. Live.
###
The End