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Part 2: Aeryn
Aeryn Sun looked skeptically at the ground vehicle her husband John Crichton was attempting to start – he called it “hot wiring.” In the early morning gloom, the car looked even more primitive than his Farscape module. Much to her surprise, its engine quickly ignited with a roar. She wondered if he’d known how to do that before, or if his skill came from all his tinkering with the module over the past four cycles.
John, who was sitting in the driver’s seat, leaned over and opened the passenger door for her. “See! Get in, and we’ll get going, just in case the guy who owns this car happens to come looking for it any time soon….”
Aeryn shrugged. “Well, since this is your plan, that’s probably guaranteed.” She put the carry bag full of John’s “gifts” for his father into the back of the vehicle, then wrapped her long leather coat around her and climbed awkwardly into the front.
John leaned across her and pulled the door closed. As he sat back up, he paused for a moment and ran a hand down her cheek. “It’ll be all right,” he said. She hoped it would be.
Aeryn found the seatbelt with no problem and settled back into the seat as John began to drive. He was uncharacteristically quiet, and she found herself worrying about his state of mind. Being inside a vehicle, and worrying about John, helped keep her mind off the fact that they were not only planet side, but that the planet was John’s potentially hostile homeworld, Earth.
The chance to visit Earth had come as a complete surprise, a gift from a race as advanced as the Ancients, and it still had involved a lot of planning on their part. If John hadn’t been determined to see his father and his friend DK, it would have been a lot easier, but because of the risks of contact, things were very complicated. Aeryn just hoped that their friends on Moya wouldn’t have to come in, guns blazing, to rescue them from some sort of incarceration.
After they’d been driving for a while, John said, “Hey, check the glove compartment, why don’t you?”
“The what?”
“The glove compartment.” He gestured with his right hand to what seemed to be a hinged door in the panel in front of her. “People keep all sorts of things in there. There might be something we can use.”
Aeryn fumbled with the latch and opened the door. She recognized a roadmap from her visit to the false Earth three cycles before. “Do you need this?” she asked.
John gave her discovery a quick glance and said, “No, we’ll do fine. This is the main highway. If my dad hasn’t moved, I can find the house in my sleep.”
Some of the items she recognized – protective eye coverings, a hair brush – and others she didn’t. “What’s this,” she asked, holding up what appeared to be some sort of small electronic device.
“Jackpot!” exclaimed John. “That’s a cell phone! Scourge of mankind, but it means we don’t have to find a way to pay for a phone to call DK.”
This was the part of the plan she liked least. John wanted to meet with both his father and his friend at the same time, contacting DK and asking him to bring his father to his father’s house. That meant two possible people to betray them, instead of just one. Indeed, if they simply showed up at his father’s home unannounced and made their presence known, they would be a lot more secure. There would be no opportunity for an ambush. But John wanted to meet with them both at once, and for some reason – probably emotional – he preferred this more complicated scenario. Well, it was his world. He knew every one of her objections; for now, she would play it his way.
She put the phone back into the storage compartment, and settled back to watch the countryside go by. It was actually quite beautiful; different from the “Australia” that had been created from John’s memories three cycles earlier, but still, a pretty planet, as planets went.
John reached forward and pressed some buttons on the control panel. Sound burst forth, and he broke into a grin! “All right! Radio!”
“And you call this?”
“Music,” he announced gleefully. “Well, I don’t recognize this, exactly,” he said with a small frown, “but it’s rock and roll. You want to tune it for me? If we find an oldies station, there’ll be stuff I know.”
She looked at the controls dubiously, but soon found that punching one set of buttons made the music change.
“Just keep going till I tell you to stop,” he said.
After a little while in which Aeryn listened to a series of alien noises, he said, “There! That’s perfect! All right!” He started bouncing in the seat and tapping his hand on the wheel he was using to control the car. He wasn’t actually singing, but he was humming along with the music.
Aeryn watched him curiously. The music meant nothing to her, didn’t strike any chords with her, culturally or emotionally…but she’d never seen John seem so at home anywhere as he did at that moment. It made her surprisingly anxious.
After a while he subsided into quiet again, which made her even more anxious.
They abandoned the transport and its contents along a busy street, and walked into the open land behind the neighborhood John’s father lived in. His back yard opened onto this large undeveloped area, and allowed them to approach outside of the view of any neighbors who might be at home. John had called DK on the cell phone, and John and Aeryn both hoped he was bringing Jack Crichton to the house. John figured it would take something between one and two arns for DK to get his father and make the trip, if he made it at all. All that was left at that point was to wait and see if DK would let him down or not.
John led them through a gate into a manicured yard and looked back and forth, satisfying himself that it was the correct house. In the back, near where the lawn turned into more wild growth, stood a wooden shelter John called a gazebo. He walked up and slapped a white post in satisfaction. “This is it. Mom loved this gazebo. It’s why they bought the house.” His gaze swept the yard and up to the back of the house.
“Did you ever live here?” Aeryn asked.
“No, I was in college by the time they bought it. My sisters did for a while, though, and I came to visit a lot, at least till my mom got sick.” He stopped abruptly.
Knowing better than to ask about his mother, she surveyed their surroundings, from the house in front of them, to the scruffy vegetation behind. There was definitely enough room for D’Argo to land a transport pod if they needed to leave in a hurry, and the low fence presented no real barrier to exit from the yard. With luck they wouldn’t need the backup.
John set the bag of tapes and notebooks down on the steps of the gazebo, and began to pace around the yard, stopping to touch trees, or flowers, or even a wall made of some sort of stone. Aeryn watched him, but let him be. She sat down on the gazebo steps next to the bag and commed D’Argo, just to be sure he was on the alert.
She could see that each time John heard the sound of one of the ground transports, he froze. Eventually he came back towards her, and she picked up the bag and carried it over to where he stood.
“What if he doesn’t want to see me?” he whispered. “What if he doesn’t believe it’s me?”
“Shhhh,” she whispered, brushing his cheek with her hand. “The man I met risked his life for us.” When he started to protest that that had been a construct, not his father, she slid her fingers over his lips and said, “You believed in him then, why not now?”
He leaned forward, touching her forehead with his. “You’re right, I guess. I just really need to talk to him, I need for him to have missed me as much as I missed him.”
Aeryn’s heart ached for him, the more so because she only had a void in her past where he had memories of a family he adored. She reached across to put her hands on his upper arms, lending him strength, and he followed suit.
They stood quietly for a little while, leaning together. When the sound of one of the noisy ground vehicles stopped suddenly somewhere near them, Aeryn could feel John hold his breath. Two banging sounds followed. “They’re here,” John whispered, but he didn’t move, and she continued to be his support.
When the gate at the front of the yard creaked open, they both glanced in that direction, still not breaking contact. “Two men,” she said quietly. “Is that them?”
She knew the answer when John let go of her arms and stood up in relief. She flashed him a brief reassuring smile, though now she was the one who was terrified. If she were honest with herself, she knew she had been hoping that, as badly as John wanted them to, they wouldn’t come. Then, John would have left the tapes and things he had brought in some place his father would find them, and they could have left without this risk. Now, as he started walking forward, she watched his back as she never had before.
She easily recognized the man who was walking towards John as Jack Crichton, though he seemed older than the version she had met. She assumed the younger man was DK, or John would have said something. DK held back, as she was doing.
John and his father started towards each other again after a brief pause; the senior Crichton seemed as nervous as his son. She gave a brief glance to make sure DK wasn’t moving, and then looked back at John, wishing she had a weapon in her hand. She shifted her position to make sure she had access to her pulse pistol if she needed it.
After looking at each other for a long moment, John and his father wrapped each other in a hug so tight it looked like they would break each other. It reminded her a little of D’Argo’s ill-fated reunion with Jothee, except that Jack had been caught completely unawares, and had obviously thought his son was dead. Reassured somewhat, she relaxed a little and picked up the bag still sitting at her feet. She crossed the lawn to stand a little ways behind John.
A quick glance at DK showed he had followed her lead and was standing awkwardly behind Jack, looking at her curiously. She made a snap judgment that he was harmless, and looked back at John and his father, who seemed to have loosened their grip a little, but who still held each other as if afraid they would vanish.
John looked over his father’s shoulder at his friend. “Thanks for trusting me, man,” he said.
“I, uh, couldn’t take the risk. I mean, if it was you…hell, I had to see you.”
“There’s not a squad of Marines or a SWAT team preparing to move in, is there?” John asked. Aeryn had no idea what marines or a slap team were, but the intent of the question was clear.
DK said “No,” and she could see John relax. He backed off a little from his father and smiled.
Still stunned, Jack said, “Is it really you, Son? Where have you been?”
“That,” John said to both of them, “is a very long story.” Afraid he and Aeryn were going to have to leave soon, he gave them the short version of how he had been sucked into a wormhole and stuck in the Uncharted Territories. Though he didn’t say so yet, if either of these men decided that they had to report his presence to the proper authorities, Aeryn would call D’Argo. Depending on the urgency of their situation, either they would work their way back to the more secluded area where he had dropped them off, or he would come to pick them up NOW, no matter how much attention landing one of Moya’s transport pods in the middle of a suburban neighborhood would cause.
DK responded, not to the implied question about whether he would keep the secret of John’s presence, but to the news that Farscape I had been lost through a wormhole. From the look on his face, Aeryn realized that he had blamed himself for the accident that had pitched the module into the wormhole and caused John to vanish, apparently to his death. Interesting. John always blamed himself.
“Aw, DK,” John said softly, and moved over to hug his friend. “I’m sorry,” he said, “both of you,” he added, looking over at his dad. “I’m so sorry.” He backed away from DK, and the three men looked at each other for a moment. Watching John with these men he loved, Aeryn found her eyes filling with tears.
Then John looked back over his shoulder and smiled at her, a happy grin that brought an answering smile to her face. He reached for her free hand, the one that wasn’t still keeping hold of his precious tapes, and pulled her forward to stand at his side.
“Aeryn,” he said, gesturing to Jack and DK, “this is my dad, and my best friend DK.” He put his arm around her waist and continued proudly, “Guys, this is Aeryn Sun, my wife.”
“Hello,” she said in English. Over the time she’d spent on Moya, she’d picked up a very little English from John (probably not suitable for polite society, but then, they weren’t polite society on Moya!), and for this trip, knowing that his father would not be able to understand her without the translator microbes, she’d had John teach her a few simple words and phrases.
DK blinked, and Jack looked surprised at John’s announcement. Well, Aeryn herself still found it amazing at times that she was actually someone’s wife. Peacekeepers didn’t take life mates, and a large part of her inner core would always be a Peacekeeper. But despite everything, meeting John and being thrown out of the Peacekeepers was the best thing that had ever happened to her, and being married to him brought her a sense of security she had never known before. The possibility of losing him to this planet nibbled at the edges of her thoughts.
She knew a gesture was expected after the introduction, and she feared Jack was going to draw her into a fatherly embrace. Slightly panicked, she held out her hand awkwardly to him to forestall any emotional displays. Her father-in-law – that was what John had called him – looked back and forth from John’s face to hers, and then took her hand. She shook hands solemnly, then retrieved her hand and looked around the yard critically to distract herself.
After a moment she spoke matter-of-factly to John in Sebacean. “Look, can we go somewhere less exposed? If you trust them, can we go inside to talk?”
John nodded and said quietly, “Probably a good idea.”
He turned back to his father and said, “Can we go in the house? It’s pretty exposed out here.”
Jack and DK exchanged glances. Jack nodded. “Sure, Son. If that’s what you want.”
John sighed, but Aeryn nodded in satisfaction and said in English, “Thank you.” John took her hand, and the two of them and DK followed Jack into the house.
John tensed up again as they walked through the house to a room Jack called the family room. John looked at the walls, the photos, the furniture, and held her hand tightly as they walked. She squeezed his hand in reassurance, making note of the doors, hallways, and windows.
When they reached their destination, they sat down and everyone awkwardly waited for someone to speak. Jack offered to get everyone something to drink. John kicked into what she thought of as “crazy human” mode and started asking excitedly about different kinds of beverages – at least, she assumed that’s what they were. When his father offered to take him to the kitchen to make a choice, he turned to her, eyes shining. “This is great!” he exulted. “Aeryn, what do you want? I bet he’s got Coke! You can try Coke! Or orange soda!”
Aeryn gave him a long-suffering look and said in Sebacean, “You know I don’t know what any of those things taste like. Just bring me something you think I’ll like.” Undaunted, John grinned, and she softened and added, “Or something you’ve been telling me about for the last four cycles!”
He said cheerfully, “Okay,” then leaned over and kissed her forehead and headed for the kitchen with his father.
It wasn’t until John was completely out of her sight through the doorway that she stopped following him with her eyes, and then she made a brisk visual survey of the room, marking the exits once more. That done, she looked around with more curiosity. There were pictures on the walls of what she assumed were family groupings. Again, she was reminded of D’Argo, with his treasured portrait of Lo’Laan and Jothee. She wondered if any of the children in the pictures were John.
DK’s voice startled her.
“So, you’re John’s wife,” he said.
“Yes,” she smiled. He looked uncomfortable.
“You look happy together. How long have you been married?” he asked.
Without thinking, she replied in Sebacean. “He wore me down just over a cycle ago, but we’ve been together a lot longer than that.” She paused for a moment, and then, realizing he didn’t understand her, added, “I’m sorry,” in English.
This led to a halting discussion about language. DK deduced quickly enough that she and John could understand each other’s languages without actually speaking them, but unfortunately, her small amount of English didn’t allow her to explain about translator microbes. When DK suggested that John would be able to explain, she agreed.
“I can’t believe he’s all right,” DK said suddenly. “I thought I’d killed him with that damned project. He was so excited about it, he worked so hard – and then he was gone.” Apparently embarrassed, he gave a crooked smile. “But here he is, back from the dead.”
“Back from the dead” made her shiver, but he didn’t notice. He had glanced towards the kitchen, where John was. She followed his gaze, thinking about everything the fates had done to them.
“Hey, don’t worry,” DK said. “He’ll be okay. His dad would fight off the hounds of hell to protect him.”
That sounded so much like John that she gave him the same “Whatever!” look that she used when John was in full human mode. DK looked more concerned by it than John ever did. It made her realize how well John understood her, despite all their differences.
As John and his father still hadn’t reappeared, DK continued asking questions. “There are humans where you come from. Is that what John is worried about, our reaction to there being humans outside this solar system?”
“No.” She realized suddenly how John must feel all the time, being continually mistaken for a Sebacean. She smiled wistfully and continued in her own language. “John is unique in our world. Humans only seem to exist on Earth.”
DK contemplated her statement, alien, but peppered with words he did understand. “You look human,” he said slowly. “But you’re not.”
“No. Sebacean.”
“Se-bay-shun,” he tried.
“Sebacean.” Aeryn nodded.
At that moment, Jack and John came back in, Jack with a somewhat bemused expression on his face, and John carrying a tray covered with assorted cans and bottles.
“Aeryn, Baby, look at all this!” he enthused as he set the tray down on the coffee table in front of her. “Look, this is Coke, Dr. Pepper, um, here’s a Heineken – that’s real beer, not fellip nectar – um, this is a different beer, this is 7-Up….” He stopped when he saw the look on her face.
Aeryn gestured towards the tray and asked, “Are any of those non-intoxicating?”
Pulled up short, John replied, “Most of them. Except for the beer. They’re soft drinks.” He popped the tab on the red can he had called “Coke” and handed it to her. She sipped gingerly, and wrinkled her nose.
“Try some more,” John encouraged. “You’ll like it! There isn’t a place on the planet where they don’t drink Coca Cola!”
“That explains why humans are still confined to this world,” she said, but she drank some more to please him, and thought privately it was…interesting.
John continued to hand her cans and bottles with enthusiastic recommendations, taking sips himself and obviously savoring the tastes he’d missed for so long. Aeryn found it all rather overwhelming, but she was grateful to see he was careful to go easy on the beers.
Finally Jack interrupted. “John, you said you can’t stay. I don’t understand. You’re home now…”
John closed his eyes briefly and sighed. He stopped playing with the drinks, and sat down next to Aeryn again, holding her hand in his lap.
“Dad, I’m not stupid, I know I should march right in to IASA and announce I’m back. They’ll examine me, debrief me – and they’ll never let me out again. I have a home out there, Dad, and friends….I’ve changed so much. So much has happened to me. I’ve seen so much ugliness, and so much beauty. I can’t stay on a planet that doesn’t even have space travel – and I can’t ask Aeryn to stay. I’ve already cost her too much.” He turned and looked at her, and the expression on his face broke her heart. She smiled reassuringly at him and squeezed his hand.
“A lot has happened,” John repeated. “I’ve been away from Earth for four cycles – years – in the hell hole of the universe. If the IASA goons ever get a chance to do a physical, they’d lock me up and throw away the key, never mind what they’d do to Aeryn.”
She knew he was thinking of their experiences on a false Earth that had been created from his memories to test the probable reaction of humans to sharing their world with aliens. It had not been a good experience, though in some ways she had taken more positive impressions from it than he had, especially once she understood it wasn’t real.
“Son, I think you saw too many science fiction movies as a kid. We don’t dissect people at IASA,” Jack said, sounding just like John when he was trying to be soothing.
“Maybe,” John said neutrally. “You’ve probably noticed Aeryn and I can understand each other, and she can understand you. That’s translator microbes. They colonize the base of your brain and translate for you. That’s just for starters.”
Knowing what was coming, Aeryn leaned her head on his shoulder as he began a litany of trauma. “Besides that, I’ve had…a….a brain injury, I’ve got alien brain tissue in my head just so I can talk. I’ve got some memory loss. But I’m me. I’m not brainwashed or insane, I’m not a clone, a copy, a twin, a shape shifter, or a robot… But, they’d never trust me. Hell, I don’t even know if you will….”
Aeryn hoped her face hadn’t betrayed the deep pain he still felt at the references to the damage caused by Scorpius, and the twin they had lost, mixed among his hypothetical examples. John’s father was wearing a neutral expression again, so perhaps she hadn’t.
“What do you want us to do, John?” DK asked.
John explained the plan, that if they felt the need to report his presence, he and Aeryn would simply go, leaving behind the taped diary he had made in his early days in the Uncharted Territories, plus all the information he’d been able to collect on wormholes and potential threats to Earth.
Neither Jack nor DK looked very happy with this idea, and John continued, “Or, if you’re willing to take the risk of being found out, Aeryn and I can stay for a little while, we can catch up in more detail. You guys,” he said, looking wistfully from his dad to Aeryn, “can get to know each other a little better. Maybe I can see the girls somehow…. have a pizza…. some chocolate…. Hell, maybe even watch ‘Star Wars.’”
“I bought the DVD’s for you,” Jack said in a tight voice.
Aeryn sat up, stunned with the sudden understanding that everything John had talked about for four cycles was really REAL, and it was all here, now. She’d accepted everything he said, but she’d never really believed in his world, the world he had lost. All of it was HERE.
The look on her face was apparently amusing, because rather than looking concerned, John grinned and asked her, “What do you think?”
“Yoda from Dagobah?” she asked softly, eyes shining. “I’d like to see that.”
“Did she say ‘Yoda’?” Jack asked.
“And ‘Dagobah,’” DK confirmed.
John laughed. “Yeah, well, I did what I could to keep Home alive….”
Jack looked dismayed at John’s offhand comment. He threw a glance at DK, and then said to John, “Give us a minute, okay?”
“Sure, Dad.”
While his father and friend talked quietly across the room, John sat next to Aeryn, one arm around her shoulder, hand playing with wisps of her hair that had escaped her braid, the other hand in her lap, playing idly with her fingers. His gaze, however, swept the room, lingering on pictures here and there. She thought about asking if any of the pictures were of him as a child, but didn’t want to disturb him. She could ask later, if things worked out and they were able to stay for a while. For now, she sat quietly, trying to feel calm.
When John’s father and friend finished their whispered conference and came back to where they sat, John’s gaze settled on his father.
Jack took a deep breath and said, “I won’t deny that you seem different from when we lost you…. But….my heart says that you’re my son John. And I really don’t want to let you go again so soon after just finding out you’re alive. I’d lie to the President of the United States if I had to, to keep you here a little longer.” Aeryn had no idea what specifically that meant, but she could feel John relaxing, and that was good enough for her.
Jack looked over at DK and then back to John and Aeryn. “I’m an old Hero whose son just came back from the dead – even if they were inclined to give me grief, I can call in enough favors with the government or the media or whatever I need, that I’ll be okay if they find out that I didn’t tell. You can stay here for as long as you’re willing. I’ll call in sick. They owe me.”
John gave Aeryn an “I told you so” look, which she greeted with skepticism, but she was happy to see HIM happy, and so she didn’t challenge him.
But DK, it seemed, would not be able to stay. His concern for his wife and small son if he should be implicated in hiding John and Aeryn reminded Aeryn that this was still a potentially hostile planet.
John, on the other hand, was thrilled to hear that his friend had a family, and chatted with him about them. John’s teasing comment about young Joey’s rambunctious behavior being hereditary caused her to imagine what life would be like with little copies of John. It was a scary thought!
“Do you have children?” DK asked her, apparently reading her mind.
“No,” she said with the ghost of a smile. “But someday,” she added in Sebacean.
“Not yet,” John translated quietly. “We know we can have healthy kids though. When the time is right.” He looked at Aeryn again and grinned. “That’s the story of our relationship! ‘When the time is right’!”
How could he look so happy about that? Thinking about their past still gave her nightmares. And yet – he was thinking of their future, of having children with her….not that she had a maternal bone in her body…. Still, it made her feel better about being here on this planet, at least for a little while.
Looking at DK, Aeryn spoke urgently to John. “I know he’s your friend, John, and I know you want to see him, but if he’s sure he needs to go, he should go now. The longer he’s here, the more dangerous it is for us, and for him. He has a wife and child to protect.”
“She’s right, DK,” John said, for all the world as if they’d all been able to understand her. “We have no right to endanger you – your family needs you. You should go now before someone notices you aren’t at work.”
John and his friend exchanged unwilling good-byes. Aeryn knew John wanted to spend more time with DK, and sensed DK wanted to do the same. She was grateful and touched when DK reluctantly declined John’s offer to come back and see them later, on the grounds that it was safer if no one else knew they were there. No wonder John had been so determined to forge friendships on Moya from the very beginning, when no one else had even been willing to try.
John and DK exchanged a final hug, and Aeryn gave DK her most heartfelt smile. He let himself out the front door, leaving John, Aeryn and his father to stand awkwardly, wondering where to begin.
John broke the silence by saying, “So, do you have any chocolate?”
His father laughed then, and Aeryn thought everything would be all right.
Unless Jack agreed to take the translator microbes they had brought, this would be John’s visit more than hers, but that was between John and his father. In any case, she would watch, and share, and learn more about her husband and the world that had shaped him.
