Whispers
Chapter 15
Waking up this time had none of the wafting, dreaming moments that had marked his last journey from
unconsciousness to awareness. One microt he didn’t exist, and the next there was little in his life beyond a
shattering headache. Crichton took several shallow breaths, hoping that the pain would ease if he just gave it
a little time. It didn’t. Every small twitch of his muscles, right down to the movement of his chest necessary for
breathing, made it worse.
Someone asked him a question. It consisted of four small sounds clattering into his ears like wooden skeletons,
stripped of the personalized nuances that gave a sentence texture and meaning. How. Do. You. Feel.
Interrogative. With the exception of the diseased hvisk, every word uttered over the past solar day had been
clothed in deeper meanings and complexities borrowed from the speaker’s mind. Not anymore. He could
barely figure out what he was being asked. John lay quietly, eyes closed while doing his best not to move, and
pondered the adjustment that had been made to his hearing.
“John?” It was the same voice that had asked the first question. “How do you feel?”
“Gonna puke.” He had intended it as a joke. A microt after saying it, he wasn’t so sure. “The Aurora Chair felt
better than this.”
Something cold pressed against the side of his neck, startling him. Unfamiliar fingers grasped one of his wrists
and guided his hand to the object, pressing one against the other until he figured out that they wanted him to
hold it in place. A microt later, pure unadulterated relief flooded from the metal disk into the side of his neck,
and from there ballooned into his skull. The conflagration inside his head guttered and began to die out. The
relief was so intense he came close to losing his battle against the nausea.
The voice asked, “Is that better?”
“Yeah. Odds of me blowing chunks are down around forty percent now.”
“Can you sit up?”
John tried opening his eyes. He was lying on his back with a cluster of lights shining in his eyes. His view was
limited to an impression of several indistinct shadows moving back and forth beyond the blinding glare.
“D’Argo?”
It generated a lilting chorus of whistling hvisk laughter and a louder, equally amused comment. “That’s the first
time in my life I’ve ever been mistaken for a luxan.”
“Aeryn.”
The last of the nausea and the discomfort faded away, replaced by a warm, liquidly uncontrollable crawling
sensation that circled several times between his stomach and his chest. It was a weak feeling that drained his
body of strength and relaxed the snarl of tension between his shoulders. He hadn’t expected her to be there
when he woke up. Standing idly, waiting while he lay unconscious -- regardless of whether it was the result of a
hvisk sedative or an injury -- couldn’t have been easy for her. When he had nodded to the hvisk medical
specialists, giving them permission to put him to sleep, it had been with the expectation that only D’Argo would
be there when he woke up.
“Are you going to go back to sleep?” she asked.
He didn’t remembered closing his eyes … or dozing off for that matter. “No, just taking a short mental
vacation.” Experimenting, he eased the metal disk, which turned out to be attached to a small machine
standing next to the hvisk futon-bed, away from his neck. The headache was gone. The lights that were
shining in his eyes were turned off, and the painkiller device was taken away. Several sets of hands --
sebacean, luxan, and hvisk working together by the feel of it -- helped him sit up.
“He looks the way Pilot did when he first regained consciousness,” D’Argo said.
John tried to put together a witty comeback to the mild, affectionate ribbing. Unfortunately, his upper body was
weaving back and forth every bit as wildly as D’Argo’s imitation of Pilot’s recovery, he wasn’t absolutely sure
what century it was, let alone what he was supposed to do next, and the only thing preventing him from toppling
off the edge of the bed was the comforting grip that D’Argo and Aeryn had on his shoulders. Repartee was
abandoned in favor of remaining upright.
“Did it work correctly? Did they do what they promised?” Aeryn asked.
“Dunno,” he said. “Lemmee check.” It was going to be difficult. He barely had control of his body, let alone his
mind. Trusting that D’Argo and Aeryn would keep him from keeling over on to the floor, he turned his attention
inward.
For the first time in nearly two solar days, he relaxed his mental guard entirely and did his best to hear what
anyone aboard the Kyelligg was thinking, deliberately risking a mental mugging if the hvisk hadn’t completed
their job properly. There was nothing but silence. All the mechanisms necessary for telepathy were still intact;
he could feel the various bits and pieces inside his mind, each in its proper place, but the circuitry that allowed
him to use it had been disconnected as promised. The overall effect was a peculiar one, suggesting that if he
could simply reach out a micro-dench further he could grasp the controls and make it work. But no matter how
hard he tried, that final short distance could not be crossed.
He didn’t want to be telepathic. With the possible exception of Aeryn’s safety, there wasn’t an argument in the
entire universe that could have convinced him to leave it in place. And now that it was gone, he ran headlong
into mild regret. His universe had been stripped of a dimension while he slept. He was a three-dimensional
being in a cardboard landscape, surrounded by flat, nondescript settings. A degree of vibrancy had been
leached out of his life, depriving him of something that until recently he hadn’t even known existed.
The loss felt familiar. John looked at Aeryn. She was leaning close to make sure he didn’t fall over. He
examined the impassive features and recognized where he had encountered that emptiness before.
D’Argo drew him back to the here and now. “John? Is it turned off?”
Crichton accepted their help getting to his feet. The dizziness and disorientation were fading fast. “Yeah, it’s
gone. I’m deaf as a stump.” He turned to the hvisk specialists. “Anything else? Am I done here?”
They whistled for several microts, bobbing and gesticulating first at him and then at the door.
“What did they say?” D’Argo asked.
“I haven’t the foggiest notion, D. We’re back to completely clueless,” John said.
“In other words, we’re back to normal,” D’Argo said.
“Exactly right.”
“May we leave?” Aeryn said, trying a slightly different question.
This time there was nothing other than the bobbing nods of agreement. One of the hvisk stepped closer, sang
to John briefly, and gave him a quick little pat on the upper arm.
“Thanking you?” D’Argo theorized.
“At this point, your guess is as good as mine, D’Argo.”
John couldn’t bring himself to return the pat. It didn’t matter that his companions weren’t aware that it was
something more than an innocent touch on his shoulder. Returning a kiss from an oversized ostrich was one
intergalactic custom he was not going to observe. Instead, he gave the two hvisk a brief bow that mimicked
their upper-body bobs, and followed his friends out the door.
Despite some lingering dizziness that resulted in the occasional staggering foray off course, the trip to the
docking hatch went much faster than Crichton’s first journey along that route, half of which had been spent
hanging upside down over D’Argo’s shoulders. Their progress was slowed only by the occasional hvisk who
would approach and whistle an untranslatable message, sometimes accompanied by a brief pat bestowed on
one or more of the crewmates. After the fourth such address, all three agreed that they were probably being
thanked for saving the Hvisk civilization.
“This is the first time anything we planned ever worked out right,” D’Argo said.
John dodged another approaching hvisk, bowed quickly to forestall another display of appreciation, and
brushed past it without slowing. “It wasn’t our plan and they didn’t ask. Remember? They just grabbed me and
did whatever they wanted.”
“And Klamik is going to be one of their leaders,” Aeryn said quietly, “which means there is a chance this could
all happen again.”
Shocked to speechlessness, D’Argo turned to look at her and nearly collided with a tree. Impact barely
avoided, he looked first at John and then back at Aeryn.
Diagnosing stunned disbelief, John said, “It’s not a joke, D’Argo. She’s serious.” He repeated the conversation
he’d had earlier with Aeryn, describing Klamik’s special ability and the safeguards that would be put in place to
ensure that the unique individual would never again pose a threat to the mental health of the Hvisk.
D’Argo came to a morose conclusion. “It was for nothing. What they did to you, John, and everything else that
happened, was all a waste of time. If they allow Klamik to live among them, they’re begging for it to happen
again.”
“They don’t have any other choice. Exile isn’t an option with these critters,” John said. “They would never just
cut Klamik loose, and they aren’t about to execute him just because he might get sick.”
Aeryn said, “Something good may have come out of this. What about the clone?”
It was a portion of his brain he had deliberately chosen not to visit since regaining consciousness. Since
leaving the medical facility, John had continually probed outward, repeatedly testing to make sure that the
telepathy was truly disconnected. The longer his world remained closed to the thoughts of everyone around
him, the more convinced he became that the voices would gradually begin to seep through whatever sort of
constraints the hvisk had put into place. In response to what he knew was an irrational belief, he went on trying
to activate the missing mental mechanisms … just to be sure they wouldn’t work. But the one thing he hadn’t
done so far was go in search of Harvey.
“He is gone,” Aeryn said. “They didn’t change that, did they?”
He hadn’t told them about his role in the clone’s frosty entombment. He had double-checked with the hvisk
specialists to make sure that what Tulev had told him was correct, but he hadn’t shared the revelation with
anyone else. The hvisk had assured him that their tampering had nothing to do with what had been done to
the neural clone, and that there was no reason why he couldn’t keep Harvey on ice permanently. Until he
proved them right, he was reluctant to tell anyone else that it was all up to him.
“I haven’t checked,” John said.
He was bracketed by disbelief, hemmed in by D’Argo’s look of pleasant exasperation to his right and Aeryn’s
glowering not-quite-angry impatience on his left. It didn’t leave him much of an option. They would keep asking
until he gave them an answer. “Hang on,” he said, and dove into his mind.
In contrast to most of his other mental excursions to Sawyer’s Mill, this time he arrived midday. The sun was
directly overhead. John was standing at the end of the dock, both elbows propped on the railing, his back
turned to the shore. It was midday, mid-August, heat-wave type hot. The sun shimmering off the water was
malevolent in its intensity. Putting the change in time of day together with the heat and the glare, he didn’t need
to turn around to know that the change in climate was bad news.
John dropped his head and stared down at his feet, using every bit of expertise he had picked up from Hox to
search for the part of his mind that the hvisk insisted could keep Harvey caged. He built a realistic and detailed
image of the ice machine in his mind, carefully added the frost on the window, and the hasp and the lock on the
door, and then envisioned the entire thing frozen inside an enormous block of ice. John held it there, perfect in
its realism, and did his best to believe it. Tulev had said that all he needed was faith. He pictured the outcome
he wanted, and hammered his disbelief aside until he felt as though he could reach out and touch the frost-
coated window of the imagined freezer with his fingers. He counted to ten, pausing between ‘nine’ and ‘ten’ for
five additional microts, and then walked along the dock until he reached the ice machine.
The evidence of failure was soaking into the ground for six feet in every direction around the freezer. The ice
was melting fast. Water was streaming from the drains in gurgling rivulets, adding to the existing puddles with
every passing microt. The hasp and lock that had been added by his own imagination were missing entirely. It
was only a matter of time until the clone was defrosted, and once he was, there was nothing to keep him from
getting out of the ice machine.
“Harv’s back.”
D’Argo’s response was immediate and furious. “We’ll go back and tell them to do something about it. After
what you did for them --”
John grabbed D’Argo’s arm before he could reverse course. “No, it’s okay, D’Argo. They said this might
happen. Chill. I can live with it.”
“D’Argo’s right. They owe you that much,” Aeryn said.
They turned the corner into the street that held the docking hatch to Moya with John trying to shepherd the
other two forward. What was fast shaping up into an argument was interrupted by the presence of five hvisk
standing in a small cluster near the airlock.
“Send off committee,” John said, pointing ahead.
“Good. We can tell them to get rid of the clone,” D’Argo insisted.
“No! Just drop it, D’Argo. I talked to them about it. They can’t do it, so just let it go.”
Aeryn stepped in close, face to face with Crichton, and challenged him in a quiet whisper. “More secrets?
What aren’t you telling us this time?”
“Nothing, damn it.”
“I know you, John. I can’t always tell when you’re lying, but when I can, it’s obvious. You’re hiding something.”
He didn’t want to admit that he had the ability to rid himself of the clone and simply couldn’t exert the control
necessary to accomplish the Scorpy-exorcism. Even with Aeryn’s eyewitness knowledge of the extent of his
struggle to master the telepathy, he didn’t want to tell her that it was up to him, and him alone, to keep Harvey
in his place and that he had failed.
“I talked to them, Aeryn. They can’t do what you’re talking about. End of story. What I’m not sharing is all the
boring psycho-babble about how Harvey ever got locked up in the first place. They didn’t do it on purpose. It
was an accident. It was a nice accident, but that’s all it was. The vacation is over.” He returned her stare
without blinking, willing her to believe him and drop the issue. It took ten full microts before she stepped away
from him. It didn’t look like she believed him though.
“All right.” With that, she spun away and headed toward the hatch, motioning to D’Argo with a jerk of her head.
The hvisk were waiting patiently, watching the actions of the three crewmates with bright-eyed interest. Tulev
was there, as was Klamik. The three standing behind them might have been the three hvisk who had escorted
John, D’Argo, and Rygel to their first, unsuccessful barter session.
“Full circle,” John said to himself, and went to meet them.
Tulev stepped away from the others and greeted him. He bowed and gestured, all in time with a lilting melody,
finally gesturing toward Klamik. It was an introduction to an honored citizen, Crichton decided, possibly with
some sort of expression of gratitude thrown in for good measure. “You know I can’t make heads or tails out of
this, right?”
Tulev bobbed a ‘yes’, and motioned toward Klamik a second time.
“Fine. Just so you know you’re wasting your energy on me.”
He turned toward Klamik. The resemblance to Hox was so strong it hurt just to look at him. Klamik had the
same facial features; the same jaunty, half-cocked, disarrayed crest that would, with the passage of hundreds
of cycles, almost certainly fade to the same washed out purple; and the same habit of cocking his head to one
side to look at Crichton more intently. For a moment, it was as though a young Hox was standing before him,
full of energy, strength, the confidence of youth, and with hundreds of cycles of life stretching out ahead of
him. This was the person who had skulked out of his cubbling when his mate was screeching with anger, wisely
finding a place in one of the gardens to sleep until it was safe to come home. Here was the Hox who had
warbled out his delight at the hatching of his first child, had walked the streets of Kyelligg since the very first
days the ship had taken to space, and had spent eight hundred cycles learning how to mourn the loss of almost
his entire species.
“You look like the old man. You know that, don’t you?” he asked Klamik. He got a head bob. “He would have
given up anything to make sure you were found and cured. You live up to that. Don’t waste his sacrifice.”
Klamik bobbed and sang to him for several microts, gesturing gracefully with both hands. The message was
delivered with all the solemnity of a hymn, the pacing and inflection of the notes combining with his movements
to create an aria that needed no words to convey its message. It was a vow for the future and a gracious
benediction on the person who had been forced into helping them.
“Anything, John? He’s supposed to be able to send thoughts.” D’Argo had come back to stand next to him.
“Not a flicker. It must not work if the receiver is kaput. It doesn’t matter. I think I know what he’s saying. It’s a
thank you.” Klamik beamed at them, pleased that the message had been conveyed successfully. John nodded
to him several times, searching for something to say. He finally settled on, “Time for us to go. Live long and
prosper.”
Klamik chirped a final goodbye.
John and D’Argo headed toward the hatch. Aeryn had gone ahead; she was already disappearing through the
first of the airtight doors. Halfway there, John turned back. “Tulev!” The green crest swung around so it
pointed in his direction. “When you get there … when you get where you’re headed, put up something so
everyone remembers who he was, okay? I know you folks don’t put up memorials and that sort of thing, but for
me, put a rock or a bench or a garden in the middle of town and let everyone know who Hox was. Just this
once. Promise me.”
Tulev bobbed his willingness to carry out the task.
Crichton turned and followed D’Argo through the airlock. The doors clanged behind them, the final seal hissed
shut, and they were back aboard Moya, very likely never to see or set foot on the Kyelligg ever again.
“What was that last part about?” D’Argo asked.
“Nothing important,” John said. “I’m going to go check on Pilot and Moya.” He swung onto a ladder and slid out
of sight, ignoring the rungs in his rush to end the conversation. He hit the floor of the tier below with a loud
thud, nearly fell to his knees from the impact, and then headed down the corridor before D’Argo had a chance
to follow.
What had goaded him into turning back and making the sentimental request was one of Hox’s memories -- one
more small piece of information laboriously gleaned from the heap Tulev had inadvertently transferred to him.
The Hvisk were headed home. Their time of waiting was over, small fast ships had already gone ahead to
make sure their planet was inhabitable and to begin the process of rebuilding, and they were finally headed
back where each individual aboard the Kyelligg knew they truly belonged. Hox had spent the last fifty cycles of
his life hoping that he might live long enough to see his planet again; four cycles ago he had received the good
news. It hadn’t mattered to the old man that the cubbling of his parents had long since turned to rubble or that
the magnificent cities had crumbled to dust; and it hadn’t mattered to him that it would take forty cycles to finish
their journey. All he had cared about was that he was going home.
Far too late to do anything differently, John had learned that Hox was the last of the hvisk to be born on their
planet. There had been younger hatchlings on board when he had gone with his father that terrible night, but
he was the only one of the youngest children to survive the first hundred, difficult cycles in space. That first
ship, long since swallowed up by the ever-expanding structure, had been far smaller than the present-day
Kyelligg, and far less sophisticated. There had been critical malfunctions, several catastrophic losses of
atmosphere, and some hvisk simply couldn’t adapt to living in space. Hox had been lucky, his father had
watched over him well, and he had thrived in the space-going habitat.
As the number of cycles of his life mounted, passed the first hundred and moved on, his will to survive had
been kindled in part by the hope that he might some day place a single small tablet in a garden in memory of
his mother. Among the hvisk, that sort of thing wasn’t done. That was how John knew that they didn’t put up
monuments. Hox’s memories were his memories. Like Tulev, except on a smaller scale, he would carry a piece
of Hox within him forever. So he had known of Hox’s secret desire to put a polished bit of stone in a shady
corner to help him remember one person who had been left behind to face the fullest horror of The
Mindlessness. When Hox had reached for Jeckle with the intent of shielding John from the psychic backlash, he
had given up not only his life but his dream as well.
Something nudged at John’s foot, stirring him back to life. He smeared the back of a hand across his eyes and
looked around. His flight had come to an end in the middle of a corridor several junctions short of the Den. His
body had been operating on autopilot while the operator’s attention was fixated on Hox’s past. It had directed
him without incident through most of his route, finally coming to rest just shy of his destination with one shoulder
leaned against one of Moya’s internal ribs. He had been so lost in his thoughts that he couldn’t even remember
which vertical shaft he had used to descend from Tier Two to his present level.
There was a gentle bump against his ankle, accompanied by a quiet mechanical chattering. It was the same
nudge that had interrupted him a microt earlier. John looked down, expecting to find a DRD. “What the frell?”
He had acquired a large entourage. At some point since he left D’Argo, more than twenty DRDs had gathered
around him. It was possible that they had assembled while he was standing lost in thought, but it was unusual
for this many DRDs to be working in a single area of the ship. It was more likely that he had been picking them
up along the way and hadn’t noticed the growing fleet.
“What is this? A fan club?” He was treated to an extravaganza of clicks, chirps, whines, and blinking
eyestalks. “Yes? No? You’re right, that’s not the answer. I think someone is saying hello and welcome back.
Aren’t you, Moya?”
His guess received a single, synchronized blink. “Good to see you too, babe. Come on, you guys,” he said to
the collection of robots, “let’s go see Pilot.”
He finished his journey to the Den at a run. The corridor was filled with the hushed scream of motivator circuits
trying to keep up, yellow robots weaving about gaily in every direction and on the verge of tripping him at every
step. He slowed long enough to make sure the bridge across the central neural plexus wasn’t loaded with more
DRDs, and then crossed the final distance at full speed.
“Pilot! Yo, man! How ya feeling?” He went up the side of Pilot’s station in two long lunging steps and dropped
down beside the once-again alert creature with the leathery ‘whomp’ of butt smacking against leviathan-grown
consoles. “You’re looking a hell of a lot better than the last time I saw you!”
As much as it was possible with the features nature had given him, Pilot beamed at Crichton. It was far more
than the usual, quiet smile that he reserved for the happiest of occasions. This was an all-over transmission of
pleasure that affected every dench of the gleaming carapace from the top of his head to the tips of his claws.
“Commander Crichton, Moya and I owe you our lives.”
“Don’t sweat it, man. It was a group effort. None of us was about to stand around and watch you die. Aeryn
did most of it anyway, Pilot. It’s her you need to thank.”
“That has already been done.” Pilot regarded Crichton with a more customary, head-tilted look of curiosity.
“Officer Sun expressed similar sentiments of you.”
“Group effort, Pilot. Everyone contributed for a change, which may go down as a one time only event. Even
big and scaly helped out,” he said, referring to Naj Gil. John started to give the edge of Pilot’s cranial shell a
quick pat. He paused before completing the motion, feeling as though he was about to kiss the big symbiote,
and settled for stroking the armored surface instead. “No way were we going to let you and Moya die, Pilot. I’m
pretty sure one or two people might have had their own self-serving motives, but the end result worked out the
same.”
“Moya has told me what you did in order to save us. You risked your life, Crichton, and we will not forget that
sacrifice. We owe you a debt.” Pilot tended to his controls for a microt before continuing. “What was it like,
Commander? How much of Moya’s sensory flow were you capable of comprehending?”
“Too much and not enough. You know better than anyone else what it was like, Pilot. For a while, I was Moya.
It was … incredible. The words don’t exist that can describe it. But you already know that.”
“Not in the manner to which you refer. Moya’s sensor inputs are routed through buffers before reaching my
body. In essence, they are filtered and translated into a form that is compatible with my physiology. Although I
experience everything that Moya feels, including pain and pleasure as well as the functions of her internal
organs, I do not actually experience what she does.” A claw tapped lightly against John’s knee. “You are the
only one who has truly merged with Moya and understands what she senses. And …”
Crichton ducked down to get a better look at Pilot’s face. For a microt, he could have sworn that his shell had
darkened. It looked as though Pilot was blushing. “And what? Don’t stop now, big guy. It’s just you and me
here.”
“And until now, there has never been anyone with whom I can share my wonder at what I have encountered
since bonding with Moya. It would be very nice to talk about it with you sometime.”
This time he did pat the shell. Nothing else would suffice. “Count on it, Pilot.” John swung his legs around and
slid off Pilot’s consoles. “Are you absolutely sure all the pipe cleaners are gone? Did the hvisk get every last
one out of Moya? Last thing we need is a repeat of this just because they missed two slippery little lovers.”
“Moya and I are certain they are all gone. To be sure, all primary conduits have been flushed with a mixture
containing the nutrients they were feeding on. If there were any left, they would have begun breeding several
arns ago, and we would know they were on board.”
“And there was no damage from the infestation? No left over symptoms or problems?”
Pilot was beaming again. “Rather the opposite, Commander Crichton. Despite the threat to my own life, the
creatures performed the task for which they were bred. They removed extensive amounts of build-up from all
of the fluidic conduits. Moya informs me that she has not felt this good in many cycles.”
John laughed. “Whoa! Write this one down, Pilot! Something that got screwed up had a positive outcome.
This is a moment in history for us. It’s usually the other way around.”
“Not … entirely.”
The hesitation in Pilot’s voice brought Crichton’s cheerful exclamations to an abrupt stop. He turned fast,
worried that there had been side effect that would threaten Pilot’s or Moya’s life. Pilot’s look of sly humor put an
end to his concern. “Spit it out, Pilot. What’s the punch line?”
“The eels had an effect on Dominar Rygel similar to that provided to Moya. Only after gorging for several arns
did he discover that the creatures’ bodies contained a chemical that has a pronounced influence on Hynerian
physiology.” It didn’t seem possible, but Pilot’s smile widened even further. “A DRD observed Rygel entering
his waste alcove over eight arns ago, and he has not been seen or heard from since.”
“It’s my turn to be totally grossed out. That’s a visual image I could have lived without sharing.” John headed
for the door, both laughing and shaking his head at Rygel’s misfortune. “When do we leave to join up with
Talyn?” he called back.
“Within four hundred microts. The final umbilicals are being detached now. Rendezvous with Crais and Talyn
will be in approximately two arns.”
Crichton waved a hand in Pilot’s direction, made the turn into the corridor, and ran into Aeryn. They grabbed
on to each other, fighting for balance. It worked at first. The two bodies adjusted to each other in concert,
moving just right when the other one shifted, neither pair of boots getting in the way of the other pair. John slid
a hand behind her back, holding her tight in order to keep her from falling, and she went rigid. The duet
stopped. The dance turned into a confused, fumbling affair of stumbling feet and near disaster.
He grabbed Aeryn by the shoulders, set her firmly on her feet, and then tripped and staggered away from her.
The whole thing had taken less than two microts, and it had summed up their entire relationship without a single
word being spoken.
“Sorry,” he mumbled.
“I should have seen you coming.” Aeryn turned to leave.
Watching her walk away from him, John wondered if the pain in his chest was what it felt like to have a heart
attack. She continued along the corridor without hesitation, marching smartly toward wherever she was headed
without any sign that she knew he was standing there, frozen in place by the aching need to talk to her. He
turned in the opposite direction, already trying to think of a task that would keep his mind occupied with
something other than Aeryn.
“How do you deal with it?” The quiet voice stopped him before he had taken three steps.
John turned around slowly. Aeryn was five motras away with her back leaned up against the internal bulkhead,
half hidden behind one of the reinforcing ribs. “Deal with what?” he asked.
It took her a long time to answer. “With the loss -- the pain.”
He managed to stop a casual shrug before it got loose. Meant to express indecision, he knew she would
interpret it as being dismissive. It left his shoulders tucked protectively beneath his ears, as though he was
waiting to be hit. Fighting against overly tense muscles, John lowered them until he felt more like the
Hunchback of Notre Dame than an often-flogged whipping boy, and finally answered, “One day at a time.”
Aeryn shook her head. “That’s not what I mean.”
“I know what you mean, Aeryn, and there’s no good answer to your question.” They stared at each other
across a gulf much greater than the five motras between them. Her thoughts, like her expression, were
unreadable. There was no clue what she was thinking or feeling at that moment. John spent a useless moment
wishing for the insight that the telepathy would have provided, and then cautiously tried to inch his way back
into her life. “There doesn’t have to be any loss. I’m right here.”
Aeryn turned her back on him.
John took a deep breath then let it out slowly. He took one more look at the back of Aeryn Sun -- close-fitting
shirt hugging the rigidly squared shoulders, tight Peacekeeper braid lying perfectly aligned along her spine as
though by regulation, head up, every muscle tensed -- and decided to leave. This wasn’t helping either one of
them.
“I was told … ” This time her faltering voice stopped him before he could take a single step. “Someone told me
that when the person you love dies, that you lose all of them. That all the different pieces that were the best of
parts of what you had together will disappear and you’re left with nothing.”
“It’s not true, Aeryn. You have memories, and --”
“Let me finish!” He stayed quiet and waited. “But it didn’t work that way for me. It did and it didn’t. I lost
everything. You were gone, and now here you are here again. And every time I look at you …”
“You see him,” John said.
“I see everything that we had together.”
Aboard Talyn. Aeryn and the other Crichton. They had been partners in the truest sense of the word, fighting
side by side, living, loving … dying.
The fatigue he had described to Hox made an encore appearance. John wanted little else out of life than to
burrow into his bed and sleep until the ache in his chest went away, even if it meant staying under the covers
for a full cycle. He just wanted it to stop.
But he had to say something; Aeryn was waiting. “You and him.”
“US! Everything that we have been through since the first frelling day I met you. And it’s you and it’s not you,
and you’re … right here.”
They had already been through it several times. They had covered this ground standing in a corridor with no
more than two motras of space between them, and once with Aeryn perched on a seat in Command looking as
through she was ready to flee, and again standing on opposite sides of the closed grates barring him from
entering her cell. They had brushed across the dilemma more than once, and it ripped him apart every time.
He looked for something different to say, searching for the key that would allow Aeryn to move on and stop
tearing his heart to bleeding shreds every other day.
“Hox gave me some advice about grief.” She nodded, giving him permission to go on. “He said that you need
to make it a part of yourself and learn it inside and out before you can let go of it.”
“I’m not sure I could survive that.”
“I’m not sure I could either. It doesn’t matter though, because he was only partly right, Aeryn. What the Hvisk
do doesn’t work for the rest of us. The Hvisk share out their grief; they spread their loss across an entire
civilization and even across generations. They spread it so thin that it lessens the loss until it feels more like
pleasure than pain. They rejoice in it. Based on something that happened to him when he was a child, I think
Hox knew better, but he was so completely integrated with his people that he probably believed what he was
telling me.”
“Your point?”
“You can’t swallow this budong whole. If you try, it’ll swallow you instead. Chop away at it piece by piece. Find
some part of it that you can handle and work with that, and when you can live with it, move on to the next
piece.”
“What about you?”
Hox’s voice seemed to speak to him one last time, every bit as tangible as it would have been if the old man was
alive and standing next to him. Give her time, young one. Her grief is a labyrinth. In time she will find her way
out. Then she will return to you. John spoke some of the hardest words he had ever set himself to speak. It
wasn’t what he wanted and he said it anyway, knowing that it was the only answer that would work. “I’ll be right
here … waiting.”
She gave him a shaking, trembling smile, tears threatening to spill over the dam of her eyelids with every
flickering blink. Then she was gone, footsteps hurrying along the corridor.
He stood and listened, hoping she would come back. It was a different voice that spoke to him next, putting an
end to the suspended animation moment of futile wishes. His comms came alive with a subdued crackle, and
Pilot said, “Attention everyone. We will be detaching from the docking clamps in five microts. There is no need
to brace yourselves. Departure should proceed smoothly.”
John counted off the microts in his head. At ‘zero’, a shiver ran through the deck beneath his boots,
transmitting a silent reverberation through the bottoms of his feet. The unnatural stillness that had overtaken
Moya since docking came to an end, and a note that he hadn’t known was missing was restored to her eternal
background hum. Gentle pitch and roll resumed; the individually subliminal noises of a healthy leviathan
intertwined into a harmonious, audible whole; and they were headed straight into trouble as usual, taking on the
bad guys with little more than chutzpah, a reckless disregard for their own safety, and their usual ill-conceived
plan.
Crichton looked down at the growing herd of DRDs waiting patiently by his feet. His motorcade had begun to
reassemble as soon as Aeryn disappeared. “My life is back to normal,” he said to the drones. “Totally frelled.”
Several of them winked at him.
Talyn, Crais, Scorpius, a Command Carrier full of gun-toting Peacekeepers, and a heap of stolen wormhole
knowledge were waiting for him, beckoning John Crichton forward to finish the job started by someone else.
“You ready to go kick some Peacekeeper butt, Moya?” he asked.
A DRD blinked at him twice. No.
“Neither am I, but let’s go do it anyway.”
Moya spoke to him. It was a quiet susurrence of barely audible sighs that swept from one end of the corridor,
passed over him in skin-tingling ripples of vibrations, and rushed into nothingness. She could still communicate
with him without an intermediary. He hadn’t lost that. John gently patted her inner bulkhead, letting the loving
touches continue long enough that he was certain she would feel them and know them for what they were, and
then he headed for Command. He had a job to do, and he was unafraid.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
Chapter 15
Waking up this time had none of the wafting, dreaming moments that had marked his last journey from
unconsciousness to awareness. One microt he didn’t exist, and the next there was little in his life beyond a
shattering headache. Crichton took several shallow breaths, hoping that the pain would ease if he just gave it
a little time. It didn’t. Every small twitch of his muscles, right down to the movement of his chest necessary for
breathing, made it worse.
Someone asked him a question. It consisted of four small sounds clattering into his ears like wooden skeletons,
stripped of the personalized nuances that gave a sentence texture and meaning. How. Do. You. Feel.
Interrogative. With the exception of the diseased hvisk, every word uttered over the past solar day had been
clothed in deeper meanings and complexities borrowed from the speaker’s mind. Not anymore. He could
barely figure out what he was being asked. John lay quietly, eyes closed while doing his best not to move, and
pondered the adjustment that had been made to his hearing.
“John?” It was the same voice that had asked the first question. “How do you feel?”
“Gonna puke.” He had intended it as a joke. A microt after saying it, he wasn’t so sure. “The Aurora Chair felt
better than this.”
Something cold pressed against the side of his neck, startling him. Unfamiliar fingers grasped one of his wrists
and guided his hand to the object, pressing one against the other until he figured out that they wanted him to
hold it in place. A microt later, pure unadulterated relief flooded from the metal disk into the side of his neck,
and from there ballooned into his skull. The conflagration inside his head guttered and began to die out. The
relief was so intense he came close to losing his battle against the nausea.
The voice asked, “Is that better?”
“Yeah. Odds of me blowing chunks are down around forty percent now.”
“Can you sit up?”
John tried opening his eyes. He was lying on his back with a cluster of lights shining in his eyes. His view was
limited to an impression of several indistinct shadows moving back and forth beyond the blinding glare.
“D’Argo?”
It generated a lilting chorus of whistling hvisk laughter and a louder, equally amused comment. “That’s the first
time in my life I’ve ever been mistaken for a luxan.”
“Aeryn.”
The last of the nausea and the discomfort faded away, replaced by a warm, liquidly uncontrollable crawling
sensation that circled several times between his stomach and his chest. It was a weak feeling that drained his
body of strength and relaxed the snarl of tension between his shoulders. He hadn’t expected her to be there
when he woke up. Standing idly, waiting while he lay unconscious -- regardless of whether it was the result of a
hvisk sedative or an injury -- couldn’t have been easy for her. When he had nodded to the hvisk medical
specialists, giving them permission to put him to sleep, it had been with the expectation that only D’Argo would
be there when he woke up.
“Are you going to go back to sleep?” she asked.
He didn’t remembered closing his eyes … or dozing off for that matter. “No, just taking a short mental
vacation.” Experimenting, he eased the metal disk, which turned out to be attached to a small machine
standing next to the hvisk futon-bed, away from his neck. The headache was gone. The lights that were
shining in his eyes were turned off, and the painkiller device was taken away. Several sets of hands --
sebacean, luxan, and hvisk working together by the feel of it -- helped him sit up.
“He looks the way Pilot did when he first regained consciousness,” D’Argo said.
John tried to put together a witty comeback to the mild, affectionate ribbing. Unfortunately, his upper body was
weaving back and forth every bit as wildly as D’Argo’s imitation of Pilot’s recovery, he wasn’t absolutely sure
what century it was, let alone what he was supposed to do next, and the only thing preventing him from toppling
off the edge of the bed was the comforting grip that D’Argo and Aeryn had on his shoulders. Repartee was
abandoned in favor of remaining upright.
“Did it work correctly? Did they do what they promised?” Aeryn asked.
“Dunno,” he said. “Lemmee check.” It was going to be difficult. He barely had control of his body, let alone his
mind. Trusting that D’Argo and Aeryn would keep him from keeling over on to the floor, he turned his attention
inward.
For the first time in nearly two solar days, he relaxed his mental guard entirely and did his best to hear what
anyone aboard the Kyelligg was thinking, deliberately risking a mental mugging if the hvisk hadn’t completed
their job properly. There was nothing but silence. All the mechanisms necessary for telepathy were still intact;
he could feel the various bits and pieces inside his mind, each in its proper place, but the circuitry that allowed
him to use it had been disconnected as promised. The overall effect was a peculiar one, suggesting that if he
could simply reach out a micro-dench further he could grasp the controls and make it work. But no matter how
hard he tried, that final short distance could not be crossed.
He didn’t want to be telepathic. With the possible exception of Aeryn’s safety, there wasn’t an argument in the
entire universe that could have convinced him to leave it in place. And now that it was gone, he ran headlong
into mild regret. His universe had been stripped of a dimension while he slept. He was a three-dimensional
being in a cardboard landscape, surrounded by flat, nondescript settings. A degree of vibrancy had been
leached out of his life, depriving him of something that until recently he hadn’t even known existed.
The loss felt familiar. John looked at Aeryn. She was leaning close to make sure he didn’t fall over. He
examined the impassive features and recognized where he had encountered that emptiness before.
D’Argo drew him back to the here and now. “John? Is it turned off?”
Crichton accepted their help getting to his feet. The dizziness and disorientation were fading fast. “Yeah, it’s
gone. I’m deaf as a stump.” He turned to the hvisk specialists. “Anything else? Am I done here?”
They whistled for several microts, bobbing and gesticulating first at him and then at the door.
“What did they say?” D’Argo asked.
“I haven’t the foggiest notion, D. We’re back to completely clueless,” John said.
“In other words, we’re back to normal,” D’Argo said.
“Exactly right.”
“May we leave?” Aeryn said, trying a slightly different question.
This time there was nothing other than the bobbing nods of agreement. One of the hvisk stepped closer, sang
to John briefly, and gave him a quick little pat on the upper arm.
“Thanking you?” D’Argo theorized.
“At this point, your guess is as good as mine, D’Argo.”
John couldn’t bring himself to return the pat. It didn’t matter that his companions weren’t aware that it was
something more than an innocent touch on his shoulder. Returning a kiss from an oversized ostrich was one
intergalactic custom he was not going to observe. Instead, he gave the two hvisk a brief bow that mimicked
their upper-body bobs, and followed his friends out the door.
Despite some lingering dizziness that resulted in the occasional staggering foray off course, the trip to the
docking hatch went much faster than Crichton’s first journey along that route, half of which had been spent
hanging upside down over D’Argo’s shoulders. Their progress was slowed only by the occasional hvisk who
would approach and whistle an untranslatable message, sometimes accompanied by a brief pat bestowed on
one or more of the crewmates. After the fourth such address, all three agreed that they were probably being
thanked for saving the Hvisk civilization.
“This is the first time anything we planned ever worked out right,” D’Argo said.
John dodged another approaching hvisk, bowed quickly to forestall another display of appreciation, and
brushed past it without slowing. “It wasn’t our plan and they didn’t ask. Remember? They just grabbed me and
did whatever they wanted.”
“And Klamik is going to be one of their leaders,” Aeryn said quietly, “which means there is a chance this could
all happen again.”
Shocked to speechlessness, D’Argo turned to look at her and nearly collided with a tree. Impact barely
avoided, he looked first at John and then back at Aeryn.
Diagnosing stunned disbelief, John said, “It’s not a joke, D’Argo. She’s serious.” He repeated the conversation
he’d had earlier with Aeryn, describing Klamik’s special ability and the safeguards that would be put in place to
ensure that the unique individual would never again pose a threat to the mental health of the Hvisk.
D’Argo came to a morose conclusion. “It was for nothing. What they did to you, John, and everything else that
happened, was all a waste of time. If they allow Klamik to live among them, they’re begging for it to happen
again.”
“They don’t have any other choice. Exile isn’t an option with these critters,” John said. “They would never just
cut Klamik loose, and they aren’t about to execute him just because he might get sick.”
Aeryn said, “Something good may have come out of this. What about the clone?”
It was a portion of his brain he had deliberately chosen not to visit since regaining consciousness. Since
leaving the medical facility, John had continually probed outward, repeatedly testing to make sure that the
telepathy was truly disconnected. The longer his world remained closed to the thoughts of everyone around
him, the more convinced he became that the voices would gradually begin to seep through whatever sort of
constraints the hvisk had put into place. In response to what he knew was an irrational belief, he went on trying
to activate the missing mental mechanisms … just to be sure they wouldn’t work. But the one thing he hadn’t
done so far was go in search of Harvey.
“He is gone,” Aeryn said. “They didn’t change that, did they?”
He hadn’t told them about his role in the clone’s frosty entombment. He had double-checked with the hvisk
specialists to make sure that what Tulev had told him was correct, but he hadn’t shared the revelation with
anyone else. The hvisk had assured him that their tampering had nothing to do with what had been done to
the neural clone, and that there was no reason why he couldn’t keep Harvey on ice permanently. Until he
proved them right, he was reluctant to tell anyone else that it was all up to him.
“I haven’t checked,” John said.
He was bracketed by disbelief, hemmed in by D’Argo’s look of pleasant exasperation to his right and Aeryn’s
glowering not-quite-angry impatience on his left. It didn’t leave him much of an option. They would keep asking
until he gave them an answer. “Hang on,” he said, and dove into his mind.
In contrast to most of his other mental excursions to Sawyer’s Mill, this time he arrived midday. The sun was
directly overhead. John was standing at the end of the dock, both elbows propped on the railing, his back
turned to the shore. It was midday, mid-August, heat-wave type hot. The sun shimmering off the water was
malevolent in its intensity. Putting the change in time of day together with the heat and the glare, he didn’t need
to turn around to know that the change in climate was bad news.
John dropped his head and stared down at his feet, using every bit of expertise he had picked up from Hox to
search for the part of his mind that the hvisk insisted could keep Harvey caged. He built a realistic and detailed
image of the ice machine in his mind, carefully added the frost on the window, and the hasp and the lock on the
door, and then envisioned the entire thing frozen inside an enormous block of ice. John held it there, perfect in
its realism, and did his best to believe it. Tulev had said that all he needed was faith. He pictured the outcome
he wanted, and hammered his disbelief aside until he felt as though he could reach out and touch the frost-
coated window of the imagined freezer with his fingers. He counted to ten, pausing between ‘nine’ and ‘ten’ for
five additional microts, and then walked along the dock until he reached the ice machine.
The evidence of failure was soaking into the ground for six feet in every direction around the freezer. The ice
was melting fast. Water was streaming from the drains in gurgling rivulets, adding to the existing puddles with
every passing microt. The hasp and lock that had been added by his own imagination were missing entirely. It
was only a matter of time until the clone was defrosted, and once he was, there was nothing to keep him from
getting out of the ice machine.
“Harv’s back.”
D’Argo’s response was immediate and furious. “We’ll go back and tell them to do something about it. After
what you did for them --”
John grabbed D’Argo’s arm before he could reverse course. “No, it’s okay, D’Argo. They said this might
happen. Chill. I can live with it.”
“D’Argo’s right. They owe you that much,” Aeryn said.
They turned the corner into the street that held the docking hatch to Moya with John trying to shepherd the
other two forward. What was fast shaping up into an argument was interrupted by the presence of five hvisk
standing in a small cluster near the airlock.
“Send off committee,” John said, pointing ahead.
“Good. We can tell them to get rid of the clone,” D’Argo insisted.
“No! Just drop it, D’Argo. I talked to them about it. They can’t do it, so just let it go.”
Aeryn stepped in close, face to face with Crichton, and challenged him in a quiet whisper. “More secrets?
What aren’t you telling us this time?”
“Nothing, damn it.”
“I know you, John. I can’t always tell when you’re lying, but when I can, it’s obvious. You’re hiding something.”
He didn’t want to admit that he had the ability to rid himself of the clone and simply couldn’t exert the control
necessary to accomplish the Scorpy-exorcism. Even with Aeryn’s eyewitness knowledge of the extent of his
struggle to master the telepathy, he didn’t want to tell her that it was up to him, and him alone, to keep Harvey
in his place and that he had failed.
“I talked to them, Aeryn. They can’t do what you’re talking about. End of story. What I’m not sharing is all the
boring psycho-babble about how Harvey ever got locked up in the first place. They didn’t do it on purpose. It
was an accident. It was a nice accident, but that’s all it was. The vacation is over.” He returned her stare
without blinking, willing her to believe him and drop the issue. It took ten full microts before she stepped away
from him. It didn’t look like she believed him though.
“All right.” With that, she spun away and headed toward the hatch, motioning to D’Argo with a jerk of her head.
The hvisk were waiting patiently, watching the actions of the three crewmates with bright-eyed interest. Tulev
was there, as was Klamik. The three standing behind them might have been the three hvisk who had escorted
John, D’Argo, and Rygel to their first, unsuccessful barter session.
“Full circle,” John said to himself, and went to meet them.
Tulev stepped away from the others and greeted him. He bowed and gestured, all in time with a lilting melody,
finally gesturing toward Klamik. It was an introduction to an honored citizen, Crichton decided, possibly with
some sort of expression of gratitude thrown in for good measure. “You know I can’t make heads or tails out of
this, right?”
Tulev bobbed a ‘yes’, and motioned toward Klamik a second time.
“Fine. Just so you know you’re wasting your energy on me.”
He turned toward Klamik. The resemblance to Hox was so strong it hurt just to look at him. Klamik had the
same facial features; the same jaunty, half-cocked, disarrayed crest that would, with the passage of hundreds
of cycles, almost certainly fade to the same washed out purple; and the same habit of cocking his head to one
side to look at Crichton more intently. For a moment, it was as though a young Hox was standing before him,
full of energy, strength, the confidence of youth, and with hundreds of cycles of life stretching out ahead of
him. This was the person who had skulked out of his cubbling when his mate was screeching with anger, wisely
finding a place in one of the gardens to sleep until it was safe to come home. Here was the Hox who had
warbled out his delight at the hatching of his first child, had walked the streets of Kyelligg since the very first
days the ship had taken to space, and had spent eight hundred cycles learning how to mourn the loss of almost
his entire species.
“You look like the old man. You know that, don’t you?” he asked Klamik. He got a head bob. “He would have
given up anything to make sure you were found and cured. You live up to that. Don’t waste his sacrifice.”
Klamik bobbed and sang to him for several microts, gesturing gracefully with both hands. The message was
delivered with all the solemnity of a hymn, the pacing and inflection of the notes combining with his movements
to create an aria that needed no words to convey its message. It was a vow for the future and a gracious
benediction on the person who had been forced into helping them.
“Anything, John? He’s supposed to be able to send thoughts.” D’Argo had come back to stand next to him.
“Not a flicker. It must not work if the receiver is kaput. It doesn’t matter. I think I know what he’s saying. It’s a
thank you.” Klamik beamed at them, pleased that the message had been conveyed successfully. John nodded
to him several times, searching for something to say. He finally settled on, “Time for us to go. Live long and
prosper.”
Klamik chirped a final goodbye.
John and D’Argo headed toward the hatch. Aeryn had gone ahead; she was already disappearing through the
first of the airtight doors. Halfway there, John turned back. “Tulev!” The green crest swung around so it
pointed in his direction. “When you get there … when you get where you’re headed, put up something so
everyone remembers who he was, okay? I know you folks don’t put up memorials and that sort of thing, but for
me, put a rock or a bench or a garden in the middle of town and let everyone know who Hox was. Just this
once. Promise me.”
Tulev bobbed his willingness to carry out the task.
Crichton turned and followed D’Argo through the airlock. The doors clanged behind them, the final seal hissed
shut, and they were back aboard Moya, very likely never to see or set foot on the Kyelligg ever again.
“What was that last part about?” D’Argo asked.
“Nothing important,” John said. “I’m going to go check on Pilot and Moya.” He swung onto a ladder and slid out
of sight, ignoring the rungs in his rush to end the conversation. He hit the floor of the tier below with a loud
thud, nearly fell to his knees from the impact, and then headed down the corridor before D’Argo had a chance
to follow.
What had goaded him into turning back and making the sentimental request was one of Hox’s memories -- one
more small piece of information laboriously gleaned from the heap Tulev had inadvertently transferred to him.
The Hvisk were headed home. Their time of waiting was over, small fast ships had already gone ahead to
make sure their planet was inhabitable and to begin the process of rebuilding, and they were finally headed
back where each individual aboard the Kyelligg knew they truly belonged. Hox had spent the last fifty cycles of
his life hoping that he might live long enough to see his planet again; four cycles ago he had received the good
news. It hadn’t mattered to the old man that the cubbling of his parents had long since turned to rubble or that
the magnificent cities had crumbled to dust; and it hadn’t mattered to him that it would take forty cycles to finish
their journey. All he had cared about was that he was going home.
Far too late to do anything differently, John had learned that Hox was the last of the hvisk to be born on their
planet. There had been younger hatchlings on board when he had gone with his father that terrible night, but
he was the only one of the youngest children to survive the first hundred, difficult cycles in space. That first
ship, long since swallowed up by the ever-expanding structure, had been far smaller than the present-day
Kyelligg, and far less sophisticated. There had been critical malfunctions, several catastrophic losses of
atmosphere, and some hvisk simply couldn’t adapt to living in space. Hox had been lucky, his father had
watched over him well, and he had thrived in the space-going habitat.
As the number of cycles of his life mounted, passed the first hundred and moved on, his will to survive had
been kindled in part by the hope that he might some day place a single small tablet in a garden in memory of
his mother. Among the hvisk, that sort of thing wasn’t done. That was how John knew that they didn’t put up
monuments. Hox’s memories were his memories. Like Tulev, except on a smaller scale, he would carry a piece
of Hox within him forever. So he had known of Hox’s secret desire to put a polished bit of stone in a shady
corner to help him remember one person who had been left behind to face the fullest horror of The
Mindlessness. When Hox had reached for Jeckle with the intent of shielding John from the psychic backlash, he
had given up not only his life but his dream as well.
Something nudged at John’s foot, stirring him back to life. He smeared the back of a hand across his eyes and
looked around. His flight had come to an end in the middle of a corridor several junctions short of the Den. His
body had been operating on autopilot while the operator’s attention was fixated on Hox’s past. It had directed
him without incident through most of his route, finally coming to rest just shy of his destination with one shoulder
leaned against one of Moya’s internal ribs. He had been so lost in his thoughts that he couldn’t even remember
which vertical shaft he had used to descend from Tier Two to his present level.
There was a gentle bump against his ankle, accompanied by a quiet mechanical chattering. It was the same
nudge that had interrupted him a microt earlier. John looked down, expecting to find a DRD. “What the frell?”
He had acquired a large entourage. At some point since he left D’Argo, more than twenty DRDs had gathered
around him. It was possible that they had assembled while he was standing lost in thought, but it was unusual
for this many DRDs to be working in a single area of the ship. It was more likely that he had been picking them
up along the way and hadn’t noticed the growing fleet.
“What is this? A fan club?” He was treated to an extravaganza of clicks, chirps, whines, and blinking
eyestalks. “Yes? No? You’re right, that’s not the answer. I think someone is saying hello and welcome back.
Aren’t you, Moya?”
His guess received a single, synchronized blink. “Good to see you too, babe. Come on, you guys,” he said to
the collection of robots, “let’s go see Pilot.”
He finished his journey to the Den at a run. The corridor was filled with the hushed scream of motivator circuits
trying to keep up, yellow robots weaving about gaily in every direction and on the verge of tripping him at every
step. He slowed long enough to make sure the bridge across the central neural plexus wasn’t loaded with more
DRDs, and then crossed the final distance at full speed.
“Pilot! Yo, man! How ya feeling?” He went up the side of Pilot’s station in two long lunging steps and dropped
down beside the once-again alert creature with the leathery ‘whomp’ of butt smacking against leviathan-grown
consoles. “You’re looking a hell of a lot better than the last time I saw you!”
As much as it was possible with the features nature had given him, Pilot beamed at Crichton. It was far more
than the usual, quiet smile that he reserved for the happiest of occasions. This was an all-over transmission of
pleasure that affected every dench of the gleaming carapace from the top of his head to the tips of his claws.
“Commander Crichton, Moya and I owe you our lives.”
“Don’t sweat it, man. It was a group effort. None of us was about to stand around and watch you die. Aeryn
did most of it anyway, Pilot. It’s her you need to thank.”
“That has already been done.” Pilot regarded Crichton with a more customary, head-tilted look of curiosity.
“Officer Sun expressed similar sentiments of you.”
“Group effort, Pilot. Everyone contributed for a change, which may go down as a one time only event. Even
big and scaly helped out,” he said, referring to Naj Gil. John started to give the edge of Pilot’s cranial shell a
quick pat. He paused before completing the motion, feeling as though he was about to kiss the big symbiote,
and settled for stroking the armored surface instead. “No way were we going to let you and Moya die, Pilot. I’m
pretty sure one or two people might have had their own self-serving motives, but the end result worked out the
same.”
“Moya has told me what you did in order to save us. You risked your life, Crichton, and we will not forget that
sacrifice. We owe you a debt.” Pilot tended to his controls for a microt before continuing. “What was it like,
Commander? How much of Moya’s sensory flow were you capable of comprehending?”
“Too much and not enough. You know better than anyone else what it was like, Pilot. For a while, I was Moya.
It was … incredible. The words don’t exist that can describe it. But you already know that.”
“Not in the manner to which you refer. Moya’s sensor inputs are routed through buffers before reaching my
body. In essence, they are filtered and translated into a form that is compatible with my physiology. Although I
experience everything that Moya feels, including pain and pleasure as well as the functions of her internal
organs, I do not actually experience what she does.” A claw tapped lightly against John’s knee. “You are the
only one who has truly merged with Moya and understands what she senses. And …”
Crichton ducked down to get a better look at Pilot’s face. For a microt, he could have sworn that his shell had
darkened. It looked as though Pilot was blushing. “And what? Don’t stop now, big guy. It’s just you and me
here.”
“And until now, there has never been anyone with whom I can share my wonder at what I have encountered
since bonding with Moya. It would be very nice to talk about it with you sometime.”
This time he did pat the shell. Nothing else would suffice. “Count on it, Pilot.” John swung his legs around and
slid off Pilot’s consoles. “Are you absolutely sure all the pipe cleaners are gone? Did the hvisk get every last
one out of Moya? Last thing we need is a repeat of this just because they missed two slippery little lovers.”
“Moya and I are certain they are all gone. To be sure, all primary conduits have been flushed with a mixture
containing the nutrients they were feeding on. If there were any left, they would have begun breeding several
arns ago, and we would know they were on board.”
“And there was no damage from the infestation? No left over symptoms or problems?”
Pilot was beaming again. “Rather the opposite, Commander Crichton. Despite the threat to my own life, the
creatures performed the task for which they were bred. They removed extensive amounts of build-up from all
of the fluidic conduits. Moya informs me that she has not felt this good in many cycles.”
John laughed. “Whoa! Write this one down, Pilot! Something that got screwed up had a positive outcome.
This is a moment in history for us. It’s usually the other way around.”
“Not … entirely.”
The hesitation in Pilot’s voice brought Crichton’s cheerful exclamations to an abrupt stop. He turned fast,
worried that there had been side effect that would threaten Pilot’s or Moya’s life. Pilot’s look of sly humor put an
end to his concern. “Spit it out, Pilot. What’s the punch line?”
“The eels had an effect on Dominar Rygel similar to that provided to Moya. Only after gorging for several arns
did he discover that the creatures’ bodies contained a chemical that has a pronounced influence on Hynerian
physiology.” It didn’t seem possible, but Pilot’s smile widened even further. “A DRD observed Rygel entering
his waste alcove over eight arns ago, and he has not been seen or heard from since.”
“It’s my turn to be totally grossed out. That’s a visual image I could have lived without sharing.” John headed
for the door, both laughing and shaking his head at Rygel’s misfortune. “When do we leave to join up with
Talyn?” he called back.
“Within four hundred microts. The final umbilicals are being detached now. Rendezvous with Crais and Talyn
will be in approximately two arns.”
Crichton waved a hand in Pilot’s direction, made the turn into the corridor, and ran into Aeryn. They grabbed
on to each other, fighting for balance. It worked at first. The two bodies adjusted to each other in concert,
moving just right when the other one shifted, neither pair of boots getting in the way of the other pair. John slid
a hand behind her back, holding her tight in order to keep her from falling, and she went rigid. The duet
stopped. The dance turned into a confused, fumbling affair of stumbling feet and near disaster.
He grabbed Aeryn by the shoulders, set her firmly on her feet, and then tripped and staggered away from her.
The whole thing had taken less than two microts, and it had summed up their entire relationship without a single
word being spoken.
“Sorry,” he mumbled.
“I should have seen you coming.” Aeryn turned to leave.
Watching her walk away from him, John wondered if the pain in his chest was what it felt like to have a heart
attack. She continued along the corridor without hesitation, marching smartly toward wherever she was headed
without any sign that she knew he was standing there, frozen in place by the aching need to talk to her. He
turned in the opposite direction, already trying to think of a task that would keep his mind occupied with
something other than Aeryn.
“How do you deal with it?” The quiet voice stopped him before he had taken three steps.
John turned around slowly. Aeryn was five motras away with her back leaned up against the internal bulkhead,
half hidden behind one of the reinforcing ribs. “Deal with what?” he asked.
It took her a long time to answer. “With the loss -- the pain.”
He managed to stop a casual shrug before it got loose. Meant to express indecision, he knew she would
interpret it as being dismissive. It left his shoulders tucked protectively beneath his ears, as though he was
waiting to be hit. Fighting against overly tense muscles, John lowered them until he felt more like the
Hunchback of Notre Dame than an often-flogged whipping boy, and finally answered, “One day at a time.”
Aeryn shook her head. “That’s not what I mean.”
“I know what you mean, Aeryn, and there’s no good answer to your question.” They stared at each other
across a gulf much greater than the five motras between them. Her thoughts, like her expression, were
unreadable. There was no clue what she was thinking or feeling at that moment. John spent a useless moment
wishing for the insight that the telepathy would have provided, and then cautiously tried to inch his way back
into her life. “There doesn’t have to be any loss. I’m right here.”
Aeryn turned her back on him.
John took a deep breath then let it out slowly. He took one more look at the back of Aeryn Sun -- close-fitting
shirt hugging the rigidly squared shoulders, tight Peacekeeper braid lying perfectly aligned along her spine as
though by regulation, head up, every muscle tensed -- and decided to leave. This wasn’t helping either one of
them.
“I was told … ” This time her faltering voice stopped him before he could take a single step. “Someone told me
that when the person you love dies, that you lose all of them. That all the different pieces that were the best of
parts of what you had together will disappear and you’re left with nothing.”
“It’s not true, Aeryn. You have memories, and --”
“Let me finish!” He stayed quiet and waited. “But it didn’t work that way for me. It did and it didn’t. I lost
everything. You were gone, and now here you are here again. And every time I look at you …”
“You see him,” John said.
“I see everything that we had together.”
Aboard Talyn. Aeryn and the other Crichton. They had been partners in the truest sense of the word, fighting
side by side, living, loving … dying.
The fatigue he had described to Hox made an encore appearance. John wanted little else out of life than to
burrow into his bed and sleep until the ache in his chest went away, even if it meant staying under the covers
for a full cycle. He just wanted it to stop.
But he had to say something; Aeryn was waiting. “You and him.”
“US! Everything that we have been through since the first frelling day I met you. And it’s you and it’s not you,
and you’re … right here.”
They had already been through it several times. They had covered this ground standing in a corridor with no
more than two motras of space between them, and once with Aeryn perched on a seat in Command looking as
through she was ready to flee, and again standing on opposite sides of the closed grates barring him from
entering her cell. They had brushed across the dilemma more than once, and it ripped him apart every time.
He looked for something different to say, searching for the key that would allow Aeryn to move on and stop
tearing his heart to bleeding shreds every other day.
“Hox gave me some advice about grief.” She nodded, giving him permission to go on. “He said that you need
to make it a part of yourself and learn it inside and out before you can let go of it.”
“I’m not sure I could survive that.”
“I’m not sure I could either. It doesn’t matter though, because he was only partly right, Aeryn. What the Hvisk
do doesn’t work for the rest of us. The Hvisk share out their grief; they spread their loss across an entire
civilization and even across generations. They spread it so thin that it lessens the loss until it feels more like
pleasure than pain. They rejoice in it. Based on something that happened to him when he was a child, I think
Hox knew better, but he was so completely integrated with his people that he probably believed what he was
telling me.”
“Your point?”
“You can’t swallow this budong whole. If you try, it’ll swallow you instead. Chop away at it piece by piece. Find
some part of it that you can handle and work with that, and when you can live with it, move on to the next
piece.”
“What about you?”
Hox’s voice seemed to speak to him one last time, every bit as tangible as it would have been if the old man was
alive and standing next to him. Give her time, young one. Her grief is a labyrinth. In time she will find her way
out. Then she will return to you. John spoke some of the hardest words he had ever set himself to speak. It
wasn’t what he wanted and he said it anyway, knowing that it was the only answer that would work. “I’ll be right
here … waiting.”
She gave him a shaking, trembling smile, tears threatening to spill over the dam of her eyelids with every
flickering blink. Then she was gone, footsteps hurrying along the corridor.
He stood and listened, hoping she would come back. It was a different voice that spoke to him next, putting an
end to the suspended animation moment of futile wishes. His comms came alive with a subdued crackle, and
Pilot said, “Attention everyone. We will be detaching from the docking clamps in five microts. There is no need
to brace yourselves. Departure should proceed smoothly.”
John counted off the microts in his head. At ‘zero’, a shiver ran through the deck beneath his boots,
transmitting a silent reverberation through the bottoms of his feet. The unnatural stillness that had overtaken
Moya since docking came to an end, and a note that he hadn’t known was missing was restored to her eternal
background hum. Gentle pitch and roll resumed; the individually subliminal noises of a healthy leviathan
intertwined into a harmonious, audible whole; and they were headed straight into trouble as usual, taking on the
bad guys with little more than chutzpah, a reckless disregard for their own safety, and their usual ill-conceived
plan.
Crichton looked down at the growing herd of DRDs waiting patiently by his feet. His motorcade had begun to
reassemble as soon as Aeryn disappeared. “My life is back to normal,” he said to the drones. “Totally frelled.”
Several of them winked at him.
Talyn, Crais, Scorpius, a Command Carrier full of gun-toting Peacekeepers, and a heap of stolen wormhole
knowledge were waiting for him, beckoning John Crichton forward to finish the job started by someone else.
“You ready to go kick some Peacekeeper butt, Moya?” he asked.
A DRD blinked at him twice. No.
“Neither am I, but let’s go do it anyway.”
Moya spoke to him. It was a quiet susurrence of barely audible sighs that swept from one end of the corridor,
passed over him in skin-tingling ripples of vibrations, and rushed into nothingness. She could still communicate
with him without an intermediary. He hadn’t lost that. John gently patted her inner bulkhead, letting the loving
touches continue long enough that he was certain she would feel them and know them for what they were, and
then he headed for Command. He had a job to do, and he was unafraid.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
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