Whispers
Chapter 9
Crichton didn’t move until Aeryn’s footsteps faded into the distance. He let out the breath he had been holding
ever since she had first turned to leave, and gradually released the obsessively tight grip he had placed on his
mind the microt he picked up Aeryn’s thoughts about the other Crichton. There was nothing but the subdued
chattering that he had begun to hear most of the time. It was the rushing grumble of a river of thoughts, an
ever-present sound without any distinct portions. It was the background thrum of sentience without any of the
individual signatures.
“That’s better. White noise I can handle,” he said on a long sigh of relief.
He looked around him, trying to choose a spot far enough away from the drop-off in the Den that he wouldn’t be
in danger of falling if he passed out but close enough to Moya’s neural circuits that he wouldn’t have trouble
hearing her. Remembering his first encounter with the leviathan’s overwhelmingly complex flood of thoughts, a
near disaster which had occurred when the telepathy had been at its weakest, he shook his head in rueful
disbelief. “Who am I kidding? Probably ought to do this from two or three light years away.” Hearing Moya
wasn’t going to be the problem. Shutting her out would be the difficult part.
He pulled off his gloves, tossed them into the corridor, and then followed, running his hand lightly over the
mechanoid plating. Nearly a half dozen DRDs drifted out of the shadows and trailed after him. They watched
with mechanical interest as he worked his way along the corridor, feeling for something that fingertips alone
couldn’t detect. “Here,” he said, patting a spot two motras from the door to the Den. There was a neural
transfer conduit hidden within the wall. It was a flood of cold water streaming across the surface his mind,
simultaneously chilling and refreshing, and strong enough that he could feel the invisible stream caressing his
hand.
Crichton licked his lips several times, looked around him once more to make sure there wasn’t anything that
would injure him if he keeled over, and stepped closer to the wall. “Moya,” he called to the massive being that
surrounded him. “You need to be calm. You start freakin’ out and you’re going to put my brain through the
cuisinart. You understand?”
Several of the DRDs at his feet chirped, alternating between blinking once and blinking twice.
“Cuisinart means you’ll shred my neurons into useless fragments. Too much juice and you’ll deep fry ‘em to a
crackly crunch. Get it?” The group of drones gave him a single synchronized blink.
“Okay. Here we go.” John rubbed the palms of his hands down the front of his shirt several times, then along
the sides of his pants, nervously wiping already dry hands on the leather. Three times he reached out to touch
her, and three times he drew away before making contact. “Damn,” he said quietly. “This could hurt. Nice and
easy, Moya. You’re awful big, so take it nice and easy, girl.”
Something occurred to him. An almost overlooked fragment of memory swam to the surface, and he stepped
away from the arching metalloid wall. “Moya? Pilot once said that you have eight senses, right?”
A DRD near his feet blinked once.
“Can you block out half of them? I’m a bit limited here, girl. I’m used to five. I’m going to blow a gasket if I
tackle all eight. You remember what happened the last time I tried the full orchestra.”
There was a six-microt silence, and then the entire corridor sighed, as though the tier’s internal atmosphere
had been vented to release some of the pressure. Several of the DRDs chirped, and the one that had blinked
last time gave him a single wink.
“Okay. Chill, darlin’. Be calm. This won’t hurt a bit.” More prattling nonsense was perched on the tip of his
tongue. There was an avalanche of ridiculous references to various doctor’s exams begging to be spoken out
loud, accompanied by the worst case of rattlers he’d ever had in his entire life. He bit down on the comments,
and tried to concentrate on the task at hand. But instead of Moya and Pilot and the mysterious malady, all his
thoughts were centered on the fact that the last time his stomach had felt this bad, he had been sitting in the
Aurora Chair facing Scorpius for the first time. If his current bit of mental exploration went as badly as that
event, he would be lucky to ever put two coherent thoughts together ever again.
“Damn. I’m scared spitless here,” he whispered, admitting what emotion was creating his hesitation. “Come on,
Johnny boy. If Spock can handle this, how hard can it be?” Crichton took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and
placed the palms of both hands against the gleaming surface.
ALONE … SO ALONE. SCARED.
“Crap!” He pulled away in a rush. “Moya? You’ve got to tone it down a bit. Can you do that?”
Moya rumbled a long moan and the floor shuddered beneath his feet. The herd of DRDs chattered at him, no
two signals exactly alike. Several began spinning in undirected circles.
“No! Don’t panic, Moya! We’re going to save Pilot and you’re going to be fine. You just have to be calm.
Listen to me. Controlling the fear is like holding your breath. Believe me, Moya, I know what it’s like not to have
someone you love beside you. It’s all you can think about day and night. There’s nothing but that empty space
where someone belongs. It’s as if a piece of your own body has been ripped away, leaving nothing but the pain
behind. You need to push it to the side just far enough that you can concentrate on something else while it’s
still there. It’s like holding your breath and breathing at the same time. I know it’s hard, but if you concentrate,
you can do it.”
He counted silently to ten, giving her time to make the adjustment, and tried again.
Loneliness. Silence where there belongs another mind, another voice, another presence. A missing entity
where there should be a companion. Missing, missing, missing the one that is always here to organize, to
instruct, to assist, to fill the voids that must be filled. There has always been another there. Always. There
must be another, to ease the ache and calm the fears.
“We’ll save him. I promise.” An electronic signal arrives, one of hundreds relayed from the drones. He hears
his own voice stumbling through the assurances, trying to calm the being that feels like himself now that he is
listening to her. It comes to him in an echo: the first version is barely heard through his own ears, then it is
received a second time, more clearly, through the data stream being transmitted by the DRD sitting at his feet.
“Moya, I’m here. I’m listening to you. Show me. Show me where we go to help Pilot.” He doesn’t know if he is
human or leviathan after that. He gets sucked into her conduits, the awareness that is Moya pulling him toward
where the problem lies, surging in time with the flowing pulses of her body until he’s sure that he’s a living space
ship.
John Crichton, the human, the being who cares, who has always cared, who cares about everyone. LOVE. He
is enveloped in the emotion, in Moya’s impressions of him, and he begins to dissolve into her, losing all sense of
his own consciousness to the tsunami that is her emotions and senses.
“Love you too,” he hears himself say, and is puzzled because his voice is slurred and indistinct, as though he is
having trouble forming the words.
Will he? The thought becomes his, as if he had created it on his own. But it’s larger, more complex, leviathan-
sized, a super-sized meal of intricately entwined possibilities. If Pilot does not recover, will he stay with her,
take care of her, make sure she survives?
“You betcha,” his body responds without any assistance from his detached intellect. Together they receive the
transmission from the DRD, together they experience her relief, basking in the certainty that he loves her and
will watch over her in Pilot’s stead. It swells, growing exponentially until he understands that up until this
moment she has been shielding him from the full strength of her intellect. “Moya, you’re toasting my circuits.
Back off.” The wave crashes over him, thunders past, and eases. Once again he can concentrate on where
she is taking him.
“Show me the problem,” his abandoned body requests. He hears it through the multiple inputs of the DRDs.
Each unit transmits at an infinitesimally different frequency, allowing her to tell them apart, and the harmonizing
dissonance is unlike anything his ears have ever heard. It’s a beehive-buzzing symphony, atonal sounds
combining into a melodious total that reverberates through his bones. He tries to stop long enough to listen,
but she is focusing on the problem and there’s only one option: he has to go wherever Moya takes him.
He’s on a waterslide ride without end, slithering through power lines, conduits, and slurping wet fluid transfer
pipes at hetch-speed velocities, knowing what it feels like to keep track of every synaptic discharge and
corpuscle in a body the size of a small city. Moya shows him. She leads him to the problem, focuses her entire
being on it, lets him see the uncomfortable churning feeling that he had felt in his stomach earlier that day, and
he knows what is wrong. They hover there for what might be one hundred microts or one hundred cycles, time
flooding past him in waves that he no longer comprehends, and he feels where he is, where the problem is
located within this miraculous body that clanks mechanically in harmony with the pulses of living tissue.
It’s time to leave. He needs to tell the others what to do to save Pilot. He turns, and has no idea where to go.
He is a leviathan now. There is no need to go any particular place within this body because he is this body.
Moya needs to check on something having to do with her calorics, and she reopens one of the dampened
senses -- one that his brain was never designed to perceive. He takes it in, hovering on the brink of mental
dissolution, and thinks he can almost understand what he is feeling. His hull tingles from the brush of an ion
wave, his stomach churns hot and overly full with the energy that moves a starship, he feels the comforting
pinch of the docking clamps somewhere near the top of his shoulders. Human and leviathan physiology
become indistinguishable, and he begins to fragment.
Moya, I can’t find my way out.
His message goes unspoken. The DRDs watch as the human’s body -- eyes gazing into an unseen distance,
mouth gaping, muscles gone slack -- slides slowly to the floor and they don’t receive his message. He is lost
inside Moya, and he doesn’t know how to get back inside that small shell of a human body.
* * * * *
Chiana bounded from one console on Command to another on the far side of the chamber. She checked the
displayed data for the fourteenth time, worry transmuted into nervous energy, and then switched back to the
first console, taking a detour to check the corridor along the way. “Frell, frell, frell. Where is everyone?” She
addressed her next, louder comment to the comms. “D’Argo? How you holding up down there?”
“These lines are frelling clogged solid!” came an infuriated answer. “How much time does Crichton need? We
can’t keep Pilot alive this way much longer.”
“I don’t know. Not much longer maybe. I’ll check in a few microts if I haven’t heard from him or Aeryn.”
Her assurances were met by a low luxan growl of combined frustration and intense physical effort. “Check now,
Chiana. And tell them to hurry.”
“Hurry, hurry, hurry. Nothing aboard this heap ever takes place at anything other than an all out panic,” she
complained in a half-whisper. “Hurry is average. To go any faster I’ll have to learn to starburst all on my own.”
“Chiana!” D’Argo’s aggravated shout interrupted her brief monologue.
“Checking,” she transmitted back, then reverted to a whisper. “You’re wearing a frelling comms,
D’Argo. Why don’t you just ask her yourself?”
“Ask who what? What’s going on?” a voice asked from behind her. Startled, Chiana spun around just in time to
gape at Aeryn as the other woman hurried into Command. “How is Moya holding up?”
“She’s calmed down. What are you doing here? Did Crichton find the problem already? So fast? What did he
find out? What’s wrong with Pilot?” Chiana took four gangling, skipping steps to the other console. “The
readings haven’t changed. You haven’t fixed it! What’s happening?”
Aeryn shook her head and waved her hands, trying to still the flood of questions. “Crichton is checking with
Moya now. I don’t know what’s wrong yet. It’s been less than a quarter of an arn, Chiana.”
Command went silent. Chiana took two steps forward, glaring at Aeryn with a head-twitching combination of
anger, concern and disbelief. Several microts passed before she managed to form a word. “He’s still
checking? You … you left him there by himself? Alone?”
“He insisted that he couldn’t listen to Moya with anyone else there.” Aeryn’s body had gone very still,
unnaturally so, hiding even the smallest signals that might have suggested why she had left Crichton alone or
how she felt about Chiana’s reaction. She crossed to the strategy table and sat down, perched on the edge of
the seat. Both feet rested squarely on the floor beneath her hips, deliberately placed where she would be able
to get up in an instant, ready to attack … or retreat.
Chiana spent two microts trying to decide what the stillness and preparation for flight meant, and then resorted
to a more direct method of getting information. “You said you were going to stay! You told me you were going
to stay with him!”
“Crichton insisted that he wouldn’t be able to hear Moya if there was someone else --”
“Not ‘someone’, Aeryn. Not anyone else aboard this boat. You! You’re all he hears because he keeps
listening for your voice. You are the only person he wants to hear speaking to him, and you can’t even stand to
say his frelling name anymore! You stopped calling him Crichton more than a cycle ago. Now you can barely
get ‘John’ out of your mouth unless you’re talking about the other one, you frelling heartless tralk.” Chiana
spun away from the temporarily speechless sebacean, awkwardly cocked knees and elbows shouting her
outrage, and continued her alarmed yell. “D’Argo! Crichton is by himself and he’s talking with Moya. You’re
closer than anyone else. You have to get up there right away.”
A single luxan snarl answered her, followed by the sound of boots pounding on metalloid leviathan floors.
Chiana turned back toward the strategy table, intending to deliver one more parting shot before heading off to
join D’Argo, and was forced to take a fast step back. Aeryn was beside her, almost touching Chiana’s arm,
having crossed the short distance from the strategy table without making a sound. Hand resting on the butt of
her pulse pistol, the ex-soldier simply stood there, stock still, and stared into the nebari’s eyes. Chiana took
another cautious sliding step backward, considering that her tendency to say whatever came to mind had just
brought her closer to disaster than at any other time in her life.
“You haven’t earned the right --” Aeryn began.
Chiana took a deeper breath and got ready to run. Under any other circumstances, she would have tried to
appeal to Aeryn with a combination of humor and sly wit, perhaps going so far as to suggest that Crichton
would be angry if Aeryn shot her. In light of how she had gotten into her current mess, she decided that silence
might be the best solution just this once. She clamped her tongue between her teeth, the only way she knew of
to make absolutely sure she wouldn’t say anything else stupid, and eased another four denches toward the
questionable safety of the corridor.
Aeryn’s eyes flickered between the slow-motion retreat and the doorway, and then her shoulders relaxed half a
dench.
“You stay here and watch these indicators.” Aeryn emphasized her instructions with four fast jabs at the
displays that had been set to monitor Pilot’s life signs. “If any of them drop below the lowest parameters, comm
us. If you frell this up and Pilot dies because you didn’t stay here, I will find you and I will shoot you.” Without
another word or twitch of expression, she turned and ran out of Command.
“Frell me.” Chiana began breathing again once the other woman was gone. “I frelling spit in the eye of Cholak
that time!” She shook out her arms and legs, trying to rid herself of the mild, leftover buzzing that came with
being scared for her life, and then settled herself at the console and stared intently at the readouts.
* * * * *
He was in trouble. At some point during his attempt to backtrack toward his body, he had lost contact with
Moya’s consciousness and he couldn’t find her despite the fact that he was coasting through her body. Without
that blazing waypoint to guide him, he had been set adrift, expanding out of control to the point that his
consciousness was beginning to thin and dissolve. Each attempt to find his way back to some haven of
sentience, be it Moya or his own body, only resulted in more confusion and a further expansion of his psyche.
Reason dictated that he was alive and well inside his own body. Only his awareness had been divorced from
the sprawled figure lying in the corridor outside the Den. Unfortunately, that knowledge didn’t provide any
substantial help. John tried to reach toward the bipedal mammalian shell, seeking its familiar environs, and only
managed to fragment even further. He tried every trick Hox had taught him, from looking for the tightly wound
collection of basic thoughts and reactions that uniquely defined him as ‘John Crichton’ to searching for the
metallic taste that had first led him to the portion of his brain that could tame the runaway telepathy. Nothing
worked.
‘Hang together,’ he ordered. The command seemed to help. Reason and logic returned, pushing back
the encroaching nightmarish sensation that he was dissolving. ‘I’m melting, melting. Oh what a world, what a
world …’ He wanted lips and vocal chords to voice the small parody.
The return of humor drove back the threat of dissolution even further, giving him time to ponder his dilemma.
His brain, along with all its inexplicable workings, was residing safely within the confines of his skull. It was only
his awareness that had gone for a three-hour tour and gotten lost in Moya’s innards. Mentally envisioning
closing his eyes in order to concentrate, he tried to focus on being in his own body, what it felt like to lie on the
floor half propped up against Moya’s curved wall, and did his best to will himself back into that small vessel. It
was just as futile as every other attempt.
He didn’t know how to handle this particular situation. Every other time he’d lost control, he had been crushed
under the weight of millions of thoughts. The arns with Hox had been spent learning how to shut out the
sounds of everyone around him. Moya was different. She had so thoroughly welcomed him into her alien
psyche that he couldn’t figure out how to tear away from that merging. Hox, the person who held the answer to
his problem, was out there, just a mind’s throw away. To get help, all he had to do was project his thoughts --
an ability he didn’t possess.
Crichton continued to drift along an energy conduit, moving at the same pace as the surges of ions, destination
unknown. Without understanding where the knowledge came from, he recognized a branching neural transfer
line as one that was headed in the general direction of the corridor outside the Den. He flooded into the
smaller opening and accelerated, surpassing the normal rate of flow, aware that he could lose his grasp on his
tenuous control at any microt and needed to hurry.
A signal concerning his status slid past him going the other way, headed for Moya’s data stores. He ignored
the flickering pulse, caring only that he was headed in the right direction, and kept going. There was a quick
jerk like someone had yanked his arm, except that it affected his entire being, and he was suddenly looking at
his own body from someone else’s perspective. Backtracking toward the source of the fleeting signal had led
him to a DRD. The drone was tucked into a corner formed by the inner bulkhead and one of Moya’s ribs, and
was observing Aeryn and D’Argo standing over John Crichton’s slouched, deserted body. It was the first
television he’d seen in nearly four cycles and he had managed to find the most surreal programming possible.
‘Discovery Channel meets Red Dwarf,’ he thought.
The concern about dissolution continued to fade. Coalescing in the smaller package of the DRD was almost
familiar; the limited confines were far more comfortable than his temporary occupation of an entire leviathan.
His new set of surroundings was similar to being strapped in to the cockpit of the module: low headroom,
limited view, metal all around, and a steady incoming stream of electronic data. ‘Except the way my luck has
been running, this sucker will get flushed down a damn toilet this time around.’
Across the corridor, D’Argo was kneeling alongside his vacated body, gently shaking one shoulder. He
experienced the mild jostling like a borrowed, hand-me-down sensation. One portion of his brain registered the
grip and the movement; the remainder of his consciousness was quite happy with the idea that he was a DRD
and refused to abandon that impression.
‘Dorothy the DRD. Click my heels together three times and repeat ‘there’s no place like John’,’ he joked silently
to himself, and tried to leap across the three-motra gap. He was stuck in the robot, impotently watching and
listening through the drone’s circuitry, unable to act or respond.
“What should we do?” D’Argo asked. “He’s been like this a long time.”
“I’m not sure,” Aeryn answered, dropping onto one knee. “I don’t know if he would want us to disturb him if he is
still trying to find the problem.”
‘YES!’ John screamed to her. ‘Please disturb me!’ The thought went unvoiced; his body remained motionless.
Aeryn moved closer to him, ducking her head to check on him. John tried to move the DRD forward, intending
to bump into her leg to let her know that he was nearby. The vacated body in front of him kicked out one leg in
response. The sole of his boot squealed across the floor. The fast, abrupt movement upset his precarious
balance and his body started to slump to one side. D’Argo caught him, hoisted him up and slid in behind him to
keep it from happening again. Somewhere on the other side of the universe, the solid, warm weight of a luxan
sitting behind him pressed against his back.
He wasn’t really in the DRD, John reminded himself. He was a psychic limpet, firmly attached to Moya’s
intellect. It was her awareness of the drone that he was interpreting. This was one small portion of her
expansive stream of data that he had chosen to inhabit for the time being. There had to be a way to shake
himself loose and return to his own body.
Something else was happening in the corridor. Aeryn turned away from his body and rubbed her hand across
her cheek. With an entirely human sense of despair, he realized that she was wiping away tears. The shock of
seeing her cry nearly accomplished what logic and reason could not. For a single microt, he was back inside
his body with D’Argo holding him upright, then, like a bungie jumper reaching the end of his cord, he snapped
back to the spot inside the DRD. ‘Crap!’ he yelled inside his own mind. He had almost made it home. John
considered the scenery in the corridor to determine what had upset Aeryn to the point of actual tears, hoping
that another gut-clenching jolt might trigger a successful transition from Moya-limpet to Erp-man.
The DRD was watching the combined figures of D’Argo and John Crichton, so he reviewed that first. He was
reclining into his friend’s arms, the leg that had moved -- his right one -- lying across the ankle of his bent left
leg, his eyes staring sightlessly in front of him. A dream image of the dead Crichton’s body leapt into his mind,
a not-memory that he had no right to possess, and the two views were nearly identical. Dismay worked better
than shock. This time he had a full microt inside his own body before he rebounded to Moya and the DRD.
‘FRELL!’ he screamed into nothingness.
First things first, he decided. To start with, more than anything else, he needed to let Aeryn know that he was
alive, even if disembodied. Aeryn had moved out of the DRD’s field of vision. He sent a command to the robot
instructing it to retrain its eyestalks to the side, to see whether she had left completely or was merely standing
off to one side. The robot remained motionless, but John Crichton’s head came up and his eyes shifted in the
wrong direction: away from Aeryn. He tried to shift the DRD eyestalks the other way, and his eyes swiveled
toward where she had disappeared from sight.
The movement worked better than he ever could have hoped. It took care of two problems at once. Aeryn saw
the movement and not only stopped crying, she made the fast leap in understanding that he had come to rely
on whenever his plans started to go to dren.
“John?” She crouched low to meet his stare. “D’Argo, we have to do something now! He’s in some kind of
trouble. JOHN!” she yelled louder, tipping his chin up to look into his eyes.
The last Christmas he had celebrated on Earth, he had gone into Radio Shack to look for a receiver for his
father and had tried out one of the radio-controlled dune buggies they had on display. The speedy little model
had zipped right out of the store into the mall and slammed into a woman’s ankle the first time he had tried it,
and had plowed into a wall on the next attempt. That had been simple compared to this endeavor.
He tried sending a command for the DRD to extend its laser probe. His right hand jerked forward instead. It
slapped limply against Aeryn’s knee. She grabbed it, curled the fingers in and compressed it in both of her
hands. Across the chasm he felt a faint echo of the pain. It wasn’t enough.
This bizarre method of controlling his body couldn’t go on forever. Sooner or later the DRD was going to be
ordered to perform some trivial bit of maintenance task, and it would depart, taking him with it. When that
happened, he would surely be lost forever. He had to let them know that he needed help, and he had to do it
quickly.
He tried to send an SOS in Morse code through the DRD. ‘… --- …’ he commanded it, once again forgetting
that he wasn’t really inside the mechanical device. “Help,” the body sitting in the tier whispered.
“He needs something more,” Aeryn said. John sent the Morse code again, compressing it into a single vigorous
burst of information.
“Help,” John Crichton said. Although the word was louder this time, it lacked any vestige of emotion. A voice
synthesizer could have pleaded more passionately. D’Argo pulled out his knife and handed it to Aeryn hilt first.
The razor sharp edge hovered over his palm and he braced himself mentally for the fast recall to an injured
body. She hesitated, switched her grip so that it would be a stab instead of a slice, and still didn’t strike.
“Help,” his body insisted tonelessly one more time.
There was a flashing communication from Moya to the DRD, too fast for him to follow. It extended its laser tool,
darted forward, and his view from the eyestalks was filled with the palm of his own left hand. ‘Shit,’ he thought,
realizing that the leviathan intended to save Aeryn the emotional burden of deliberately injuring him. This was
going to hurt even more than the fast slash of a sharp blade. The laser fired.
“Son of a bitch!” He rolled out of someone’s grasp, clutching his seared hand carefully to his chest, and curled
his body around the throbbing source of pain. “Frell, frell, frell! Damn that hurt!”
“Stay still. Give me that.”
Cool, firm fingers first coaxed him to unwind, tugged his head and shoulders into someone’s lap, and then
pulled his hands away from his body. One hand grasped his wrist firmly; the other one hooked its fingers into
his and cautiously pulled his fist open. His palm was burned and blisters were already forming, but to his relief
the DRD had used a relatively low setting and hadn’t bored a hole clear through his hand.
“That wasn’t exactly a walk in the park,” he said on the beginnings of a groan. The pain was settling down to a
steady misery. It was good though. The discomfort kept him focused, aware of his own body, and it helped him
block out the usual residual mental noise. For the first time in arns, it was almost quiet inside his head -- almost
but not entirely silent. Even if he hadn’t recognized the hands holding his, there could never have been any
question who was behind him, holding him securely in her lap with one elbow.
[i]I shouldn’t have asked him to do this,[/i] leaked through repeatedly. The refrain was circling through her
thoughts, providing a constant baseline tone beneath the rest of the fragments he was picking up from time to
time. Images of Pilot, Moya, and John Crichton -- he wasn’t sure if it was him or the other one -- flickered by in
subliminal flashes, too fast to be comprehended. They began to merge into a single whole that felt similar to
what he had just experienced while trapped inside Moya.
“Let me sit up.”
He tried to pull loose. Aeryn wouldn’t release him. She kept her fingers locked against his so he couldn’t make
a fist and held him tighter, the opposite of what he had been trying to accomplish. Something different washed
over him, something that felt like a wave of sun-warmed water rippling over him while he lay on well-baked sand
at the beach. For a split microt, it felt like love. It mutated before he could be sure, turning into a level of pain
that easily drowned out what he was feeling from his injured hand.
“Let go, Aeryn.” He needed to break the skin-to-skin contact. If he could do that, then his jacket might provide
enough insulation that he would be able to shut out the rest of it. John tugged harder, trying to free his left
hand without adding to the problem by grabbing Aeryn’s wrist with his right.
“Relax your fingers. D’Argo has gone to get something for the burns.” Her grasp on his wrist eased, silently
offering a truce: If he stopped struggling, she would release his imprisoned hand. Ignoring the crackling
discomfort of singed and blistered flesh, he stretched his fingers wide, showing her that he was cooperating,
and she let go of him.
They remained that way for dozens of silent microts: Crichton with his head and shoulders resting in her lap,
her leather pants providing just enough of a barrier that he could spend some time thinking about other things
without having to fend off each of her stray, idle thoughts.
He thought about all the things he wanted to tell her at the moment: about how he was sorry that she was in so
much pain; that he wanted to comfort her, and show her that John Crichton was still very much alive and wanted
to restore her happiness; and that he hadn’t objected to using the telepathy to listen to Moya because he was
afraid for himself, but because he had been rocked to his very core that she would risk his life in this manner
when all she could think of was how the other one had died. He wanted to ask her how she could mourn the
other John Crichton so deeply, and in the next breath ask him to risk a similar fate. He bit down all the things
he wanted to say, comments about how he was every bit as much John Crichton as the other one, and tried to
concentrate on Aeryn instead.
“Sorry,” was all he said in the end. It was a generic apology, covering what he knew she was feeling, as well as
the slumped, unseeing position of his body that had moved her to the brink of tears.
“I pushed you to do this. I’m the one who should apologize.” GUILT
“Let me sit up.” He tried to roll to the side, needing to break the physical contact. Just a few arns earlier,
clothing had been enough to mute his mental hearing. It wasn’t enough anymore. The talent had grown too
strong for simple solutions like leather and cloth. He slid off her legs, hit the floor with a thump, and floundered
for a microt, trying to get his arms underneath his upper body without putting his hand on the floor.
Aeryn got to her feet, grabbed him under the arms and levered him up on to his knees. “Give yourself some
time.”
John sits in his quarters and listens to his dead self. “Okay, I’m gonna piss you off now, man. Be smart. Don’t
push her. She takes … time.”
John slumped forward, elbows on the floor, head hanging down between his arms. He hadn’t realized she had
been listening when he had played the recording. Discovering that she had watched the one-sided exchange
cast too many of his offhand comments and hesitations over the past several solar days in a new light. In each
case, he had thought his words and actions were hiding what he was trying to do. And she had known all along
that they were his feeble attempts to give her space when all he wanted to do was take her into his arms and
hug her until all the hurt went away. He shook his head, forehead rocking back and forth on the floor, and was
able to feel little else than despair. At no time since the day he had met Aeryn had so many different portions
of their lives gone to dren all at once.
“I’m trying … John. But I don’t know how to do this.” She touched his back lightly then stepped away from him.
“I … just … don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
On any other day, he wouldn’t have known if she was talking about touching him or curing Pilot or the wounds
they were inflicting on each other. He might have been able to make a wild ass guess but he wouldn’t have
known for sure. But on this particular day, there wasn’t any doubt. It wasn’t a stray thought or her voice in his
head that convinced him; it was the aura of confusion hovering behind him, lending its misery to every breath
that he took.
John straightened up, sat back on his heels, and stared down at his blistered hand. He clenched it into a fist.
The pain billowed up his forearm, rushed past his elbow and shoulder, and radiated into his chest. It felt better
than what he had been going through a microt earlier.
“You’re not supposed to do anything specific, Aeryn. No one has a neat, convenient answer written down
somewhere in a tactical manual that’s going to tell you how to solve a mess like this. You do what you have to
do, and when you’re ready, you let me know.”
“How can I not love him?”
“Sometimes we don’t have a choice. Life is frelled like that.” He realized too late that he was answering a
question that he wasn’t supposed to have heard. “Sorry.” The two of them had been saying that to each other
a lot since the hvisk had remodeled the inside of his head.
“I don’t mind.”
And he knew that she truly didn’t mind his inadvertent eavesdropping. The hovering cloud of feelings behind
him was relieved that she didn’t have to put it into words, or batter her way through the misunderstandings that
were part of the inadequacies of language. When he had answered her question, she had been pleasantly
surprised that he hadn’t taken the thought to mean that she wanted to stop loving him. If it had been spoken
aloud, she was certain he would have heard a desire to find a way to close down what she felt for him, instead
of the self-loathing she felt every time she looked at him and wanted to feel no emotions at all.
John twisted around to look at her. For the first time since she had gotten off the transport pod, she met his
eyes squarely and held his look. There were no quick glances past him or to the side, no shuttering of her
feelings, no closing down every bit of expression. Aeryn was there, with all her complexities, assured facets,
and desperate insecurities. For a brief instant, they were together again. He embraced the moment to the
fullest extent possible, certain that it was going to have to last him for too long, and then released her by the
simple expedient of looking away.
Aeryn was nowhere near ready to resume their normal, bickering, chaotic relationship. This was a momentary
break in her grief, and he didn’t need telepathy to recognize it for what it was. John hung his head, flexed his
hand several times to provide a more pleasant sensation than the snarl of discomfort inside his chest, and
struggled to be understanding. He silently lectured himself that he had to take whatever she could give him for
the moment, enjoy the respite, and be ready for the expected shutdown when it occurred. The plan, when
reviewed in his mind, sounded so reasonable; it sounded mature and adult. But like so many of his other plans,
the execution would probably go to dren before it was over, and he would undoubtedly wind up feeling like his
emotions had been stripped down until there was nothing but raw nerve endings. Just thinking about what lay
ahead hurt.
“John?”
He had been kneeling in the corridor long enough that his feet had begun to go numb. “Help me up. We’ve got
some surgery that needs doing. Pilot needs a bypass procedure. He’s got hardening of the arteries.”
She grimaced and shook her head: the familiar signal that he had just totally flipped out her translator
microbes. He tried again, cutting it down to the most basic idea. “Let’s go fix Pilot.”
Aeryn stayed where she was and gestured vaguely in his direction. “Your hand needs --”
“D’Argo can meet us there. It’s closer to the maintenance bay anyway.” He tried to get up on his own and
wound up sprawling face down onto the floor, feeling more of the effects of the mental pounding he had taken
by merging with Moya. The corridor did one of its increasingly familiar loop-de-loops, danced back and forth
sideways several times, and then did a new trick. It felt as though he were floating in midair even though the
floor remained firmly against his chest. It was a nauseating sensation.
“Uh oh. Whirlies. Leviathan-spins.”
“Is that like those bed-spins things you described once?” Aeryn helped him to his knees and then steadied him
while he clambered to his feet. She led him to the side of the corridor and started to prop him up against one of
the walls.
“Yeah, only way bigger. No, not against Moya.” He rested a forearm against her shoulder, relying on Aeryn for
balance instead of the much larger and mentally overwhelming leviathan, and gestured in the direction of the
closest ladder to the next lower tier. “Down one level. Right below Pilot.”
“That’s where we’ve got Naj Gil,” Aeryn said.
“He still pumping? Trying to keep Pilot going?”
“The last time I checked, he had given up. We have less than an arn or Pilot won’t recover even if we manage
to get the circulation restored before he dies.”
“Better hurry then.” Together, with Aeryn trying to provide some stability without actually holding on to him,
they lurched and stumbled toward the access shaft leading down-ship.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
Chapter 9
Crichton didn’t move until Aeryn’s footsteps faded into the distance. He let out the breath he had been holding
ever since she had first turned to leave, and gradually released the obsessively tight grip he had placed on his
mind the microt he picked up Aeryn’s thoughts about the other Crichton. There was nothing but the subdued
chattering that he had begun to hear most of the time. It was the rushing grumble of a river of thoughts, an
ever-present sound without any distinct portions. It was the background thrum of sentience without any of the
individual signatures.
“That’s better. White noise I can handle,” he said on a long sigh of relief.
He looked around him, trying to choose a spot far enough away from the drop-off in the Den that he wouldn’t be
in danger of falling if he passed out but close enough to Moya’s neural circuits that he wouldn’t have trouble
hearing her. Remembering his first encounter with the leviathan’s overwhelmingly complex flood of thoughts, a
near disaster which had occurred when the telepathy had been at its weakest, he shook his head in rueful
disbelief. “Who am I kidding? Probably ought to do this from two or three light years away.” Hearing Moya
wasn’t going to be the problem. Shutting her out would be the difficult part.
He pulled off his gloves, tossed them into the corridor, and then followed, running his hand lightly over the
mechanoid plating. Nearly a half dozen DRDs drifted out of the shadows and trailed after him. They watched
with mechanical interest as he worked his way along the corridor, feeling for something that fingertips alone
couldn’t detect. “Here,” he said, patting a spot two motras from the door to the Den. There was a neural
transfer conduit hidden within the wall. It was a flood of cold water streaming across the surface his mind,
simultaneously chilling and refreshing, and strong enough that he could feel the invisible stream caressing his
hand.
Crichton licked his lips several times, looked around him once more to make sure there wasn’t anything that
would injure him if he keeled over, and stepped closer to the wall. “Moya,” he called to the massive being that
surrounded him. “You need to be calm. You start freakin’ out and you’re going to put my brain through the
cuisinart. You understand?”
Several of the DRDs at his feet chirped, alternating between blinking once and blinking twice.
“Cuisinart means you’ll shred my neurons into useless fragments. Too much juice and you’ll deep fry ‘em to a
crackly crunch. Get it?” The group of drones gave him a single synchronized blink.
“Okay. Here we go.” John rubbed the palms of his hands down the front of his shirt several times, then along
the sides of his pants, nervously wiping already dry hands on the leather. Three times he reached out to touch
her, and three times he drew away before making contact. “Damn,” he said quietly. “This could hurt. Nice and
easy, Moya. You’re awful big, so take it nice and easy, girl.”
Something occurred to him. An almost overlooked fragment of memory swam to the surface, and he stepped
away from the arching metalloid wall. “Moya? Pilot once said that you have eight senses, right?”
A DRD near his feet blinked once.
“Can you block out half of them? I’m a bit limited here, girl. I’m used to five. I’m going to blow a gasket if I
tackle all eight. You remember what happened the last time I tried the full orchestra.”
There was a six-microt silence, and then the entire corridor sighed, as though the tier’s internal atmosphere
had been vented to release some of the pressure. Several of the DRDs chirped, and the one that had blinked
last time gave him a single wink.
“Okay. Chill, darlin’. Be calm. This won’t hurt a bit.” More prattling nonsense was perched on the tip of his
tongue. There was an avalanche of ridiculous references to various doctor’s exams begging to be spoken out
loud, accompanied by the worst case of rattlers he’d ever had in his entire life. He bit down on the comments,
and tried to concentrate on the task at hand. But instead of Moya and Pilot and the mysterious malady, all his
thoughts were centered on the fact that the last time his stomach had felt this bad, he had been sitting in the
Aurora Chair facing Scorpius for the first time. If his current bit of mental exploration went as badly as that
event, he would be lucky to ever put two coherent thoughts together ever again.
“Damn. I’m scared spitless here,” he whispered, admitting what emotion was creating his hesitation. “Come on,
Johnny boy. If Spock can handle this, how hard can it be?” Crichton took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and
placed the palms of both hands against the gleaming surface.
ALONE … SO ALONE. SCARED.
“Crap!” He pulled away in a rush. “Moya? You’ve got to tone it down a bit. Can you do that?”
Moya rumbled a long moan and the floor shuddered beneath his feet. The herd of DRDs chattered at him, no
two signals exactly alike. Several began spinning in undirected circles.
“No! Don’t panic, Moya! We’re going to save Pilot and you’re going to be fine. You just have to be calm.
Listen to me. Controlling the fear is like holding your breath. Believe me, Moya, I know what it’s like not to have
someone you love beside you. It’s all you can think about day and night. There’s nothing but that empty space
where someone belongs. It’s as if a piece of your own body has been ripped away, leaving nothing but the pain
behind. You need to push it to the side just far enough that you can concentrate on something else while it’s
still there. It’s like holding your breath and breathing at the same time. I know it’s hard, but if you concentrate,
you can do it.”
He counted silently to ten, giving her time to make the adjustment, and tried again.
Loneliness. Silence where there belongs another mind, another voice, another presence. A missing entity
where there should be a companion. Missing, missing, missing the one that is always here to organize, to
instruct, to assist, to fill the voids that must be filled. There has always been another there. Always. There
must be another, to ease the ache and calm the fears.
“We’ll save him. I promise.” An electronic signal arrives, one of hundreds relayed from the drones. He hears
his own voice stumbling through the assurances, trying to calm the being that feels like himself now that he is
listening to her. It comes to him in an echo: the first version is barely heard through his own ears, then it is
received a second time, more clearly, through the data stream being transmitted by the DRD sitting at his feet.
“Moya, I’m here. I’m listening to you. Show me. Show me where we go to help Pilot.” He doesn’t know if he is
human or leviathan after that. He gets sucked into her conduits, the awareness that is Moya pulling him toward
where the problem lies, surging in time with the flowing pulses of her body until he’s sure that he’s a living space
ship.
John Crichton, the human, the being who cares, who has always cared, who cares about everyone. LOVE. He
is enveloped in the emotion, in Moya’s impressions of him, and he begins to dissolve into her, losing all sense of
his own consciousness to the tsunami that is her emotions and senses.
“Love you too,” he hears himself say, and is puzzled because his voice is slurred and indistinct, as though he is
having trouble forming the words.
Will he? The thought becomes his, as if he had created it on his own. But it’s larger, more complex, leviathan-
sized, a super-sized meal of intricately entwined possibilities. If Pilot does not recover, will he stay with her,
take care of her, make sure she survives?
“You betcha,” his body responds without any assistance from his detached intellect. Together they receive the
transmission from the DRD, together they experience her relief, basking in the certainty that he loves her and
will watch over her in Pilot’s stead. It swells, growing exponentially until he understands that up until this
moment she has been shielding him from the full strength of her intellect. “Moya, you’re toasting my circuits.
Back off.” The wave crashes over him, thunders past, and eases. Once again he can concentrate on where
she is taking him.
“Show me the problem,” his abandoned body requests. He hears it through the multiple inputs of the DRDs.
Each unit transmits at an infinitesimally different frequency, allowing her to tell them apart, and the harmonizing
dissonance is unlike anything his ears have ever heard. It’s a beehive-buzzing symphony, atonal sounds
combining into a melodious total that reverberates through his bones. He tries to stop long enough to listen,
but she is focusing on the problem and there’s only one option: he has to go wherever Moya takes him.
He’s on a waterslide ride without end, slithering through power lines, conduits, and slurping wet fluid transfer
pipes at hetch-speed velocities, knowing what it feels like to keep track of every synaptic discharge and
corpuscle in a body the size of a small city. Moya shows him. She leads him to the problem, focuses her entire
being on it, lets him see the uncomfortable churning feeling that he had felt in his stomach earlier that day, and
he knows what is wrong. They hover there for what might be one hundred microts or one hundred cycles, time
flooding past him in waves that he no longer comprehends, and he feels where he is, where the problem is
located within this miraculous body that clanks mechanically in harmony with the pulses of living tissue.
It’s time to leave. He needs to tell the others what to do to save Pilot. He turns, and has no idea where to go.
He is a leviathan now. There is no need to go any particular place within this body because he is this body.
Moya needs to check on something having to do with her calorics, and she reopens one of the dampened
senses -- one that his brain was never designed to perceive. He takes it in, hovering on the brink of mental
dissolution, and thinks he can almost understand what he is feeling. His hull tingles from the brush of an ion
wave, his stomach churns hot and overly full with the energy that moves a starship, he feels the comforting
pinch of the docking clamps somewhere near the top of his shoulders. Human and leviathan physiology
become indistinguishable, and he begins to fragment.
Moya, I can’t find my way out.
His message goes unspoken. The DRDs watch as the human’s body -- eyes gazing into an unseen distance,
mouth gaping, muscles gone slack -- slides slowly to the floor and they don’t receive his message. He is lost
inside Moya, and he doesn’t know how to get back inside that small shell of a human body.
* * * * *
Chiana bounded from one console on Command to another on the far side of the chamber. She checked the
displayed data for the fourteenth time, worry transmuted into nervous energy, and then switched back to the
first console, taking a detour to check the corridor along the way. “Frell, frell, frell. Where is everyone?” She
addressed her next, louder comment to the comms. “D’Argo? How you holding up down there?”
“These lines are frelling clogged solid!” came an infuriated answer. “How much time does Crichton need? We
can’t keep Pilot alive this way much longer.”
“I don’t know. Not much longer maybe. I’ll check in a few microts if I haven’t heard from him or Aeryn.”
Her assurances were met by a low luxan growl of combined frustration and intense physical effort. “Check now,
Chiana. And tell them to hurry.”
“Hurry, hurry, hurry. Nothing aboard this heap ever takes place at anything other than an all out panic,” she
complained in a half-whisper. “Hurry is average. To go any faster I’ll have to learn to starburst all on my own.”
“Chiana!” D’Argo’s aggravated shout interrupted her brief monologue.
“Checking,” she transmitted back, then reverted to a whisper. “You’re wearing a frelling comms,
D’Argo. Why don’t you just ask her yourself?”
“Ask who what? What’s going on?” a voice asked from behind her. Startled, Chiana spun around just in time to
gape at Aeryn as the other woman hurried into Command. “How is Moya holding up?”
“She’s calmed down. What are you doing here? Did Crichton find the problem already? So fast? What did he
find out? What’s wrong with Pilot?” Chiana took four gangling, skipping steps to the other console. “The
readings haven’t changed. You haven’t fixed it! What’s happening?”
Aeryn shook her head and waved her hands, trying to still the flood of questions. “Crichton is checking with
Moya now. I don’t know what’s wrong yet. It’s been less than a quarter of an arn, Chiana.”
Command went silent. Chiana took two steps forward, glaring at Aeryn with a head-twitching combination of
anger, concern and disbelief. Several microts passed before she managed to form a word. “He’s still
checking? You … you left him there by himself? Alone?”
“He insisted that he couldn’t listen to Moya with anyone else there.” Aeryn’s body had gone very still,
unnaturally so, hiding even the smallest signals that might have suggested why she had left Crichton alone or
how she felt about Chiana’s reaction. She crossed to the strategy table and sat down, perched on the edge of
the seat. Both feet rested squarely on the floor beneath her hips, deliberately placed where she would be able
to get up in an instant, ready to attack … or retreat.
Chiana spent two microts trying to decide what the stillness and preparation for flight meant, and then resorted
to a more direct method of getting information. “You said you were going to stay! You told me you were going
to stay with him!”
“Crichton insisted that he wouldn’t be able to hear Moya if there was someone else --”
“Not ‘someone’, Aeryn. Not anyone else aboard this boat. You! You’re all he hears because he keeps
listening for your voice. You are the only person he wants to hear speaking to him, and you can’t even stand to
say his frelling name anymore! You stopped calling him Crichton more than a cycle ago. Now you can barely
get ‘John’ out of your mouth unless you’re talking about the other one, you frelling heartless tralk.” Chiana
spun away from the temporarily speechless sebacean, awkwardly cocked knees and elbows shouting her
outrage, and continued her alarmed yell. “D’Argo! Crichton is by himself and he’s talking with Moya. You’re
closer than anyone else. You have to get up there right away.”
A single luxan snarl answered her, followed by the sound of boots pounding on metalloid leviathan floors.
Chiana turned back toward the strategy table, intending to deliver one more parting shot before heading off to
join D’Argo, and was forced to take a fast step back. Aeryn was beside her, almost touching Chiana’s arm,
having crossed the short distance from the strategy table without making a sound. Hand resting on the butt of
her pulse pistol, the ex-soldier simply stood there, stock still, and stared into the nebari’s eyes. Chiana took
another cautious sliding step backward, considering that her tendency to say whatever came to mind had just
brought her closer to disaster than at any other time in her life.
“You haven’t earned the right --” Aeryn began.
Chiana took a deeper breath and got ready to run. Under any other circumstances, she would have tried to
appeal to Aeryn with a combination of humor and sly wit, perhaps going so far as to suggest that Crichton
would be angry if Aeryn shot her. In light of how she had gotten into her current mess, she decided that silence
might be the best solution just this once. She clamped her tongue between her teeth, the only way she knew of
to make absolutely sure she wouldn’t say anything else stupid, and eased another four denches toward the
questionable safety of the corridor.
Aeryn’s eyes flickered between the slow-motion retreat and the doorway, and then her shoulders relaxed half a
dench.
“You stay here and watch these indicators.” Aeryn emphasized her instructions with four fast jabs at the
displays that had been set to monitor Pilot’s life signs. “If any of them drop below the lowest parameters, comm
us. If you frell this up and Pilot dies because you didn’t stay here, I will find you and I will shoot you.” Without
another word or twitch of expression, she turned and ran out of Command.
“Frell me.” Chiana began breathing again once the other woman was gone. “I frelling spit in the eye of Cholak
that time!” She shook out her arms and legs, trying to rid herself of the mild, leftover buzzing that came with
being scared for her life, and then settled herself at the console and stared intently at the readouts.
* * * * *
He was in trouble. At some point during his attempt to backtrack toward his body, he had lost contact with
Moya’s consciousness and he couldn’t find her despite the fact that he was coasting through her body. Without
that blazing waypoint to guide him, he had been set adrift, expanding out of control to the point that his
consciousness was beginning to thin and dissolve. Each attempt to find his way back to some haven of
sentience, be it Moya or his own body, only resulted in more confusion and a further expansion of his psyche.
Reason dictated that he was alive and well inside his own body. Only his awareness had been divorced from
the sprawled figure lying in the corridor outside the Den. Unfortunately, that knowledge didn’t provide any
substantial help. John tried to reach toward the bipedal mammalian shell, seeking its familiar environs, and only
managed to fragment even further. He tried every trick Hox had taught him, from looking for the tightly wound
collection of basic thoughts and reactions that uniquely defined him as ‘John Crichton’ to searching for the
metallic taste that had first led him to the portion of his brain that could tame the runaway telepathy. Nothing
worked.
‘Hang together,’ he ordered. The command seemed to help. Reason and logic returned, pushing back
the encroaching nightmarish sensation that he was dissolving. ‘I’m melting, melting. Oh what a world, what a
world …’ He wanted lips and vocal chords to voice the small parody.
The return of humor drove back the threat of dissolution even further, giving him time to ponder his dilemma.
His brain, along with all its inexplicable workings, was residing safely within the confines of his skull. It was only
his awareness that had gone for a three-hour tour and gotten lost in Moya’s innards. Mentally envisioning
closing his eyes in order to concentrate, he tried to focus on being in his own body, what it felt like to lie on the
floor half propped up against Moya’s curved wall, and did his best to will himself back into that small vessel. It
was just as futile as every other attempt.
He didn’t know how to handle this particular situation. Every other time he’d lost control, he had been crushed
under the weight of millions of thoughts. The arns with Hox had been spent learning how to shut out the
sounds of everyone around him. Moya was different. She had so thoroughly welcomed him into her alien
psyche that he couldn’t figure out how to tear away from that merging. Hox, the person who held the answer to
his problem, was out there, just a mind’s throw away. To get help, all he had to do was project his thoughts --
an ability he didn’t possess.
Crichton continued to drift along an energy conduit, moving at the same pace as the surges of ions, destination
unknown. Without understanding where the knowledge came from, he recognized a branching neural transfer
line as one that was headed in the general direction of the corridor outside the Den. He flooded into the
smaller opening and accelerated, surpassing the normal rate of flow, aware that he could lose his grasp on his
tenuous control at any microt and needed to hurry.
A signal concerning his status slid past him going the other way, headed for Moya’s data stores. He ignored
the flickering pulse, caring only that he was headed in the right direction, and kept going. There was a quick
jerk like someone had yanked his arm, except that it affected his entire being, and he was suddenly looking at
his own body from someone else’s perspective. Backtracking toward the source of the fleeting signal had led
him to a DRD. The drone was tucked into a corner formed by the inner bulkhead and one of Moya’s ribs, and
was observing Aeryn and D’Argo standing over John Crichton’s slouched, deserted body. It was the first
television he’d seen in nearly four cycles and he had managed to find the most surreal programming possible.
‘Discovery Channel meets Red Dwarf,’ he thought.
The concern about dissolution continued to fade. Coalescing in the smaller package of the DRD was almost
familiar; the limited confines were far more comfortable than his temporary occupation of an entire leviathan.
His new set of surroundings was similar to being strapped in to the cockpit of the module: low headroom,
limited view, metal all around, and a steady incoming stream of electronic data. ‘Except the way my luck has
been running, this sucker will get flushed down a damn toilet this time around.’
Across the corridor, D’Argo was kneeling alongside his vacated body, gently shaking one shoulder. He
experienced the mild jostling like a borrowed, hand-me-down sensation. One portion of his brain registered the
grip and the movement; the remainder of his consciousness was quite happy with the idea that he was a DRD
and refused to abandon that impression.
‘Dorothy the DRD. Click my heels together three times and repeat ‘there’s no place like John’,’ he joked silently
to himself, and tried to leap across the three-motra gap. He was stuck in the robot, impotently watching and
listening through the drone’s circuitry, unable to act or respond.
“What should we do?” D’Argo asked. “He’s been like this a long time.”
“I’m not sure,” Aeryn answered, dropping onto one knee. “I don’t know if he would want us to disturb him if he is
still trying to find the problem.”
‘YES!’ John screamed to her. ‘Please disturb me!’ The thought went unvoiced; his body remained motionless.
Aeryn moved closer to him, ducking her head to check on him. John tried to move the DRD forward, intending
to bump into her leg to let her know that he was nearby. The vacated body in front of him kicked out one leg in
response. The sole of his boot squealed across the floor. The fast, abrupt movement upset his precarious
balance and his body started to slump to one side. D’Argo caught him, hoisted him up and slid in behind him to
keep it from happening again. Somewhere on the other side of the universe, the solid, warm weight of a luxan
sitting behind him pressed against his back.
He wasn’t really in the DRD, John reminded himself. He was a psychic limpet, firmly attached to Moya’s
intellect. It was her awareness of the drone that he was interpreting. This was one small portion of her
expansive stream of data that he had chosen to inhabit for the time being. There had to be a way to shake
himself loose and return to his own body.
Something else was happening in the corridor. Aeryn turned away from his body and rubbed her hand across
her cheek. With an entirely human sense of despair, he realized that she was wiping away tears. The shock of
seeing her cry nearly accomplished what logic and reason could not. For a single microt, he was back inside
his body with D’Argo holding him upright, then, like a bungie jumper reaching the end of his cord, he snapped
back to the spot inside the DRD. ‘Crap!’ he yelled inside his own mind. He had almost made it home. John
considered the scenery in the corridor to determine what had upset Aeryn to the point of actual tears, hoping
that another gut-clenching jolt might trigger a successful transition from Moya-limpet to Erp-man.
The DRD was watching the combined figures of D’Argo and John Crichton, so he reviewed that first. He was
reclining into his friend’s arms, the leg that had moved -- his right one -- lying across the ankle of his bent left
leg, his eyes staring sightlessly in front of him. A dream image of the dead Crichton’s body leapt into his mind,
a not-memory that he had no right to possess, and the two views were nearly identical. Dismay worked better
than shock. This time he had a full microt inside his own body before he rebounded to Moya and the DRD.
‘FRELL!’ he screamed into nothingness.
First things first, he decided. To start with, more than anything else, he needed to let Aeryn know that he was
alive, even if disembodied. Aeryn had moved out of the DRD’s field of vision. He sent a command to the robot
instructing it to retrain its eyestalks to the side, to see whether she had left completely or was merely standing
off to one side. The robot remained motionless, but John Crichton’s head came up and his eyes shifted in the
wrong direction: away from Aeryn. He tried to shift the DRD eyestalks the other way, and his eyes swiveled
toward where she had disappeared from sight.
The movement worked better than he ever could have hoped. It took care of two problems at once. Aeryn saw
the movement and not only stopped crying, she made the fast leap in understanding that he had come to rely
on whenever his plans started to go to dren.
“John?” She crouched low to meet his stare. “D’Argo, we have to do something now! He’s in some kind of
trouble. JOHN!” she yelled louder, tipping his chin up to look into his eyes.
The last Christmas he had celebrated on Earth, he had gone into Radio Shack to look for a receiver for his
father and had tried out one of the radio-controlled dune buggies they had on display. The speedy little model
had zipped right out of the store into the mall and slammed into a woman’s ankle the first time he had tried it,
and had plowed into a wall on the next attempt. That had been simple compared to this endeavor.
He tried sending a command for the DRD to extend its laser probe. His right hand jerked forward instead. It
slapped limply against Aeryn’s knee. She grabbed it, curled the fingers in and compressed it in both of her
hands. Across the chasm he felt a faint echo of the pain. It wasn’t enough.
This bizarre method of controlling his body couldn’t go on forever. Sooner or later the DRD was going to be
ordered to perform some trivial bit of maintenance task, and it would depart, taking him with it. When that
happened, he would surely be lost forever. He had to let them know that he needed help, and he had to do it
quickly.
He tried to send an SOS in Morse code through the DRD. ‘… --- …’ he commanded it, once again forgetting
that he wasn’t really inside the mechanical device. “Help,” the body sitting in the tier whispered.
“He needs something more,” Aeryn said. John sent the Morse code again, compressing it into a single vigorous
burst of information.
“Help,” John Crichton said. Although the word was louder this time, it lacked any vestige of emotion. A voice
synthesizer could have pleaded more passionately. D’Argo pulled out his knife and handed it to Aeryn hilt first.
The razor sharp edge hovered over his palm and he braced himself mentally for the fast recall to an injured
body. She hesitated, switched her grip so that it would be a stab instead of a slice, and still didn’t strike.
“Help,” his body insisted tonelessly one more time.
There was a flashing communication from Moya to the DRD, too fast for him to follow. It extended its laser tool,
darted forward, and his view from the eyestalks was filled with the palm of his own left hand. ‘Shit,’ he thought,
realizing that the leviathan intended to save Aeryn the emotional burden of deliberately injuring him. This was
going to hurt even more than the fast slash of a sharp blade. The laser fired.
“Son of a bitch!” He rolled out of someone’s grasp, clutching his seared hand carefully to his chest, and curled
his body around the throbbing source of pain. “Frell, frell, frell! Damn that hurt!”
“Stay still. Give me that.”
Cool, firm fingers first coaxed him to unwind, tugged his head and shoulders into someone’s lap, and then
pulled his hands away from his body. One hand grasped his wrist firmly; the other one hooked its fingers into
his and cautiously pulled his fist open. His palm was burned and blisters were already forming, but to his relief
the DRD had used a relatively low setting and hadn’t bored a hole clear through his hand.
“That wasn’t exactly a walk in the park,” he said on the beginnings of a groan. The pain was settling down to a
steady misery. It was good though. The discomfort kept him focused, aware of his own body, and it helped him
block out the usual residual mental noise. For the first time in arns, it was almost quiet inside his head -- almost
but not entirely silent. Even if he hadn’t recognized the hands holding his, there could never have been any
question who was behind him, holding him securely in her lap with one elbow.
[i]I shouldn’t have asked him to do this,[/i] leaked through repeatedly. The refrain was circling through her
thoughts, providing a constant baseline tone beneath the rest of the fragments he was picking up from time to
time. Images of Pilot, Moya, and John Crichton -- he wasn’t sure if it was him or the other one -- flickered by in
subliminal flashes, too fast to be comprehended. They began to merge into a single whole that felt similar to
what he had just experienced while trapped inside Moya.
“Let me sit up.”
He tried to pull loose. Aeryn wouldn’t release him. She kept her fingers locked against his so he couldn’t make
a fist and held him tighter, the opposite of what he had been trying to accomplish. Something different washed
over him, something that felt like a wave of sun-warmed water rippling over him while he lay on well-baked sand
at the beach. For a split microt, it felt like love. It mutated before he could be sure, turning into a level of pain
that easily drowned out what he was feeling from his injured hand.
“Let go, Aeryn.” He needed to break the skin-to-skin contact. If he could do that, then his jacket might provide
enough insulation that he would be able to shut out the rest of it. John tugged harder, trying to free his left
hand without adding to the problem by grabbing Aeryn’s wrist with his right.
“Relax your fingers. D’Argo has gone to get something for the burns.” Her grasp on his wrist eased, silently
offering a truce: If he stopped struggling, she would release his imprisoned hand. Ignoring the crackling
discomfort of singed and blistered flesh, he stretched his fingers wide, showing her that he was cooperating,
and she let go of him.
They remained that way for dozens of silent microts: Crichton with his head and shoulders resting in her lap,
her leather pants providing just enough of a barrier that he could spend some time thinking about other things
without having to fend off each of her stray, idle thoughts.
He thought about all the things he wanted to tell her at the moment: about how he was sorry that she was in so
much pain; that he wanted to comfort her, and show her that John Crichton was still very much alive and wanted
to restore her happiness; and that he hadn’t objected to using the telepathy to listen to Moya because he was
afraid for himself, but because he had been rocked to his very core that she would risk his life in this manner
when all she could think of was how the other one had died. He wanted to ask her how she could mourn the
other John Crichton so deeply, and in the next breath ask him to risk a similar fate. He bit down all the things
he wanted to say, comments about how he was every bit as much John Crichton as the other one, and tried to
concentrate on Aeryn instead.
“Sorry,” was all he said in the end. It was a generic apology, covering what he knew she was feeling, as well as
the slumped, unseeing position of his body that had moved her to the brink of tears.
“I pushed you to do this. I’m the one who should apologize.” GUILT
“Let me sit up.” He tried to roll to the side, needing to break the physical contact. Just a few arns earlier,
clothing had been enough to mute his mental hearing. It wasn’t enough anymore. The talent had grown too
strong for simple solutions like leather and cloth. He slid off her legs, hit the floor with a thump, and floundered
for a microt, trying to get his arms underneath his upper body without putting his hand on the floor.
Aeryn got to her feet, grabbed him under the arms and levered him up on to his knees. “Give yourself some
time.”
John sits in his quarters and listens to his dead self. “Okay, I’m gonna piss you off now, man. Be smart. Don’t
push her. She takes … time.”
John slumped forward, elbows on the floor, head hanging down between his arms. He hadn’t realized she had
been listening when he had played the recording. Discovering that she had watched the one-sided exchange
cast too many of his offhand comments and hesitations over the past several solar days in a new light. In each
case, he had thought his words and actions were hiding what he was trying to do. And she had known all along
that they were his feeble attempts to give her space when all he wanted to do was take her into his arms and
hug her until all the hurt went away. He shook his head, forehead rocking back and forth on the floor, and was
able to feel little else than despair. At no time since the day he had met Aeryn had so many different portions
of their lives gone to dren all at once.
“I’m trying … John. But I don’t know how to do this.” She touched his back lightly then stepped away from him.
“I … just … don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
On any other day, he wouldn’t have known if she was talking about touching him or curing Pilot or the wounds
they were inflicting on each other. He might have been able to make a wild ass guess but he wouldn’t have
known for sure. But on this particular day, there wasn’t any doubt. It wasn’t a stray thought or her voice in his
head that convinced him; it was the aura of confusion hovering behind him, lending its misery to every breath
that he took.
John straightened up, sat back on his heels, and stared down at his blistered hand. He clenched it into a fist.
The pain billowed up his forearm, rushed past his elbow and shoulder, and radiated into his chest. It felt better
than what he had been going through a microt earlier.
“You’re not supposed to do anything specific, Aeryn. No one has a neat, convenient answer written down
somewhere in a tactical manual that’s going to tell you how to solve a mess like this. You do what you have to
do, and when you’re ready, you let me know.”
“How can I not love him?”
“Sometimes we don’t have a choice. Life is frelled like that.” He realized too late that he was answering a
question that he wasn’t supposed to have heard. “Sorry.” The two of them had been saying that to each other
a lot since the hvisk had remodeled the inside of his head.
“I don’t mind.”
And he knew that she truly didn’t mind his inadvertent eavesdropping. The hovering cloud of feelings behind
him was relieved that she didn’t have to put it into words, or batter her way through the misunderstandings that
were part of the inadequacies of language. When he had answered her question, she had been pleasantly
surprised that he hadn’t taken the thought to mean that she wanted to stop loving him. If it had been spoken
aloud, she was certain he would have heard a desire to find a way to close down what she felt for him, instead
of the self-loathing she felt every time she looked at him and wanted to feel no emotions at all.
John twisted around to look at her. For the first time since she had gotten off the transport pod, she met his
eyes squarely and held his look. There were no quick glances past him or to the side, no shuttering of her
feelings, no closing down every bit of expression. Aeryn was there, with all her complexities, assured facets,
and desperate insecurities. For a brief instant, they were together again. He embraced the moment to the
fullest extent possible, certain that it was going to have to last him for too long, and then released her by the
simple expedient of looking away.
Aeryn was nowhere near ready to resume their normal, bickering, chaotic relationship. This was a momentary
break in her grief, and he didn’t need telepathy to recognize it for what it was. John hung his head, flexed his
hand several times to provide a more pleasant sensation than the snarl of discomfort inside his chest, and
struggled to be understanding. He silently lectured himself that he had to take whatever she could give him for
the moment, enjoy the respite, and be ready for the expected shutdown when it occurred. The plan, when
reviewed in his mind, sounded so reasonable; it sounded mature and adult. But like so many of his other plans,
the execution would probably go to dren before it was over, and he would undoubtedly wind up feeling like his
emotions had been stripped down until there was nothing but raw nerve endings. Just thinking about what lay
ahead hurt.
“John?”
He had been kneeling in the corridor long enough that his feet had begun to go numb. “Help me up. We’ve got
some surgery that needs doing. Pilot needs a bypass procedure. He’s got hardening of the arteries.”
She grimaced and shook her head: the familiar signal that he had just totally flipped out her translator
microbes. He tried again, cutting it down to the most basic idea. “Let’s go fix Pilot.”
Aeryn stayed where she was and gestured vaguely in his direction. “Your hand needs --”
“D’Argo can meet us there. It’s closer to the maintenance bay anyway.” He tried to get up on his own and
wound up sprawling face down onto the floor, feeling more of the effects of the mental pounding he had taken
by merging with Moya. The corridor did one of its increasingly familiar loop-de-loops, danced back and forth
sideways several times, and then did a new trick. It felt as though he were floating in midair even though the
floor remained firmly against his chest. It was a nauseating sensation.
“Uh oh. Whirlies. Leviathan-spins.”
“Is that like those bed-spins things you described once?” Aeryn helped him to his knees and then steadied him
while he clambered to his feet. She led him to the side of the corridor and started to prop him up against one of
the walls.
“Yeah, only way bigger. No, not against Moya.” He rested a forearm against her shoulder, relying on Aeryn for
balance instead of the much larger and mentally overwhelming leviathan, and gestured in the direction of the
closest ladder to the next lower tier. “Down one level. Right below Pilot.”
“That’s where we’ve got Naj Gil,” Aeryn said.
“He still pumping? Trying to keep Pilot going?”
“The last time I checked, he had given up. We have less than an arn or Pilot won’t recover even if we manage
to get the circulation restored before he dies.”
“Better hurry then.” Together, with Aeryn trying to provide some stability without actually holding on to him,
they lurched and stumbled toward the access shaft leading down-ship.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
