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Time: Post UR
Rated: G
"Are you completely fahrbot?" Rygel demanded. "Where do you think you're going in that thing?"
Wearing her flight suit and carrying her helmet in one hand, Aeryn paused halfway up the ladder to the cockpit of her prowler and examined the Hynerian hovering on his throne sled only a few motras from her.
From slightly farther away but closing fast, D'Argo barked out an order in the commanding voice he'd favored since being elected "captain" of Moya. "Come down from there at once! We will all wait on board Moya to see what happens when the wormhole opens up again. No one, least of all you, should be too close to that opening!"
Aeryn stared at the crowd that had gathered in Moya's docking bay, nonplused. It appeared that only the high and mighty Sikozu hadn't felt the need to be there. The Sebecean hadn't expected an argument, and she'd told only Pilot that she was taking the prowler out. It was her ship, her life to risk, if indeed she was risking it... and her need to *be there* physically when -- or *if,* she acknowledged grimly -- Crichton reappeared through the wormhole that had snatched him so abruptly arns before.
They had no right to interfere. Before she could gather her thoughts together to reply, other voices joined in the chorus.
"What about your baby?" Chiana asked, chin jutting forward confrontationally.
"It's perfectly safe in stasis," Aeryn began, weary of hearing that argument trotted out on a regular basis.
But before she could finish, Scorpius slipped in smoothly. "....which is of no protection to it whatsoever if you are turned into a puddle of red goo by that wormhole!"
"Crichton said he knew what the problem was. He fixed it," Aeryn insisted, reaching up and defiantly tossing her helmet into the cockpit to free up her hand and give herself a little more flexibility.
Scorpius bared his teeth and snarled, but said nothing.
Aeryn wondered if he was conceding her point, or simply thought her too stupid to argue with any longer. No matter. She was going, and that was that. She merely had to wait them out, let them all have their say.
Even Pilot joined the argument from his den. "Aeryn, Moya and I believe it is safer for you all if you remain here and allow me to retrieve Commander Crichton with the docking web."
"Well, yes, you see, Pilot, you didn't do that the last time he called, now did you," she snapped, patience running thin in spite of herself.
On the clamshell, Pilot's image radiated hurt feelings despite his silence, and everyone else glared at her.
Aeryn sighed deeply. Frell. "Pilot," she said, "This is not about you and Moya." She looked around at Moya's crew. "I'm not running off like some cadet trying to play the hero," she told them. "If Crichton doesn't come back, I'll return to Moya and we'll all go through the wormhole together." And because she thought it might help, she added, "I promise."
Unexpectedly, it was the old woman, the three-eyed witch Noranti, who said, "Let her go."
Aeryn eyed her suspiciously, wondering why the support.
The woman smiled beatifically, third eye glowing blue, and elaborated, "If Crichton needs help quickly, it will be good to have someone nearby. It may as well be Aeryn. She wants to go."
Aeryn watched as the group exchanged glances, gave their silent agreement. She smiled, where once she wouldn't have. A democracy, Crichton called it. Or maybe a family. It was still a crazy way to run a ship, but it seemed to work. When D'Argo grunted, Aeryn nodded sharply to him and turned back around on the ladder, climbing the rest of the way up and dropping into the cockpit before the others were halfway to the door.
This might be foolish, she thought, starting up the engines, but she had to do it. Something in her heart, in her gut, was telling her that she needed to be out there when the wormhole reappeared.
She checked that her helmet was in reach, sealed the cockpit shut, and headed out into space to wait for John.
* * * * * * *
The prowler hung in space, waiting. Aeryn found waiting nearly unbearable, especially waiting like this, nothing to do but worry about John's safety. Why the frell did he have to wait for that wormhole, what was it he said, "up close and personal"?
She snorted. If she knew the answer to that, it would have meant he was talking to her again, had let her back into his life.
She shied away from that line of thinking, no sense fretting about that right now, while she was still terrified that he might be dead.
He'd been wearing a suit much like hers, with a limited air supply, when the wormhole had sucked him in. Deliberately snatched him, that was what it had looked like to her. He'd called to be picked up, Pilot had hesitated for some reason, and then the wormhole....took him.
It had been arns. She could only hope that if someone deliberately took him, they'd take the trouble to keep him alive.
If not, then, very shortly, *they* would no longer be alive.
She shook her head, annoyed with herself for letting her mind wander, and went back to scanning the empty space in front of her.
The gaseous cloud in the distance was beautiful.
She smiled, because John had taught her to see beauty even in the ordinary. When she'd first known him, space had been so....extraordinary....to him, where it had been just so much background noise to her. He'd stared at everything, talked on and on about the colors, the gasses, the temperatures, the planets, rings, hunks of rock and ice -- and somewhere along the line, it had rubbed off on her, like so much else.
She scanned the spot in space where the wormhole had appeared previously, looking for signs of its return. Microts ticked off as she kept up the pattern, scan left to right, back to the left for another pass, slowly working her visual scan downward through the field of view out the cockpit window.
And then she caught it, out of the corner of her right eye, just before the alarm on the automatic scanners went off and Chiana called from Moya. A faint ripple, bright blue, higher up and closer than she had expected it to be.
She sat up straight, turned to the whole spectrum of instruments available to her, and prayed to Zhaan's goddess, very, very hard. *Please* let him be there. Please let him be all right.
"Aeryn!" called Chiana again, having received no answer. "It's forming, do you see?"
"I'm on it," she replied curtly, and tuned the voices from Moya out of her conscious awareness.
The wormhole opened rapidly, and stabilized into a swirling brilliant blue tunnel. It was beautiful, too, she had to admit -- but when it didn't give up the man she waited for, Aeryn thought suddenly that she really did hate these things. They'd vied with her for John's attention from the moment she had met him, and now they seemed determined to truly take him away.
Already certain deep in her gut that John wouldn't be emerging from the tunnel in front of her, she shoved her fear down and called out to the Leviathan -- "Pilot. Open the docking bay, I'm coming in."
"Docking bay open, Officer Sun," came the prompt reply, as if to make up for his hesitation last time, and she began to turn the prowler around to return to Moya.
And then, just as it had swallowed John earlier, the wormhole -- well, if she'd had any imagination, she would have sworn the frelling thing actually moved the open end towards her, opened its mouth, and.... snatched her.
"What the frell?" she snarled, as her ship was dragged, out of her control, nose-first into the opening to a brilliant blue pathway to....somewhere.
Aeryn heard a cacophony of loud voices from Moya, some distressed, some angry, thinking she was doing this on purpose. She couldn't be bothered to answer, she was too busy trying to regain control of her ship as it rotated around the entrance to the wormhole. If she could break free of the pull, she might be able to swing loose and head back to Moya as she'd planned.
But before she knew it the prowler was fully engaged in the swirling blue tunnel, building up speed as it was drawn through, almost, she thought irrelevantly, like sliding down an angled cliff side, or over a waterfall, as she'd done many cycles ago in training for planetside combat. At least the ride seemed smooth and the wormhole itself seemed stable. It made her feel a little better about the possibility of surviving the trip. There wasn't anything else to do except to keep an eye out for an exit, and her hands on the controls, so that when that exit finally appeared, she'd be able to navigate again.
The rocking was almost soothing, and she found herself thinking again of John, and his own terrifying first trip "down the rabbit hole." At least she knew what was happening to her, even if she didn't know where she was going to end up.
And then, surprisingly soon, she reached the far end of the wormhole, wherever that was, and it spit her back out into normal space. The sensation of movement stopped, even though she almost certainly *was* still moving. She twisted her head around to look behind her, just in time to see the wormhole aperture close, vanish without a trace.
Why was she not surprised? The universe loved to frell with her almost as much as it loved to torment Crichton.
Speaking of whom.... She frantically searched the immediate vicinity, trying for visual or radio contact, but there was no sign of him. Perhaps someone had picked him up?
All right. Aeryn took a deep breath, tried to settle the rattlers in her stomach. She needed to orient herself, try to figure out where she was. Possibly the wormhole would open again. She fervently hoped so. But until then, she had reconnaissance to do.
She took a quick look out the cockpit window, hoping against hope that the stars would look familiar, but they didn't. She dismissed the view and turned to the displays on the board in front of her. They were scrolling information about the nearest stars and solar systems, and she quickly realized she was within easy flying distance of a planet with a breathable atmosphere.
That was a relief. If the wormhole didn't return, she had somewhere to go. And if, by some chance, that wormhole had deposited John in the same area of space, that planet was also the most likely place for him to be.
She peered at it through the window. It was perhaps the size of her thumb, or maybe a little smaller, at this distance, and swirled blue and white, not so different from the wormhole itself. That meant it probably had water as well as air. She aimed the prowler towards a high orbit around it, and idly studied the ball of rock as it grew larger in her field of view. It seemed to have one barren, rocky moon.
Something about it was nagging at the back of her mind, and when she got close enough to begin to make out the landmasses, she realized what it was. The rattlers were back in force.
Earth.
To borrow a phrase from Crichton, the goddamn frelling planet was Earth.
* * * * * * *
It was just more evidence the universe loved to frell with them. Aeryn snorted. Surely it couldn't be coincidence? And surely it would have drawn Crichton here as well as her. That thought calmed her down and set her back into a routine. She rapidly ran through what she knew about the level of technology of this place, and decided that she would probably be safe enough in orbit for a time. Humans were essentially a planet-bound people. They weren't likely to notice her tiny prowler, if only because they wouldn't be looking for anyone in space in the first place.
So, first things first: A more thorough search for John, in case he *was* here and still in orbit. With the limited air supply his suit carried, that was the priority. She got down to business and executed a standard search pattern for a missing squad member. She conducted electronic and visual scans of the volume of space surrounding the planet, tried to home in on his comms frequency, or the energy signature of his suit.
"Crichton!" she called over the comms. "John, can you hear me?" She didn't really expect an answer, but the sound of his name being spoken aloud, even by her own voice, was comforting. Each time she heard only static -- obviously the standard UT frequencies were still unused on Earth.
As she finished searching each section and moved on to the next, circling the planet, her hopes of finding John in space where she could simply grab him and run, if necessary, grew dimmer. Eventually she had to accept the fact that he simply wasn't floating in orbit around this planet.
Fighting to keep despair from her heart, she considered the possibilities. Either he wasn't here at all, or he was somehow hidden from her, either because he was out of her range, or because he'd been picked up by the humans and returned to the planet. Her mind skirted around the possibility that he had been too close to the planet and had burned up on reentry. No. Aeryn Sun was not even going to acknowledge that that could have happened.
So, the best-case scenario, as John would have said, was that he had been picked up by his people and was on the planet now. Probably undergoing -- and thinking about it, she shivered -- probably undergoing the kind of interrogation that he had imagined three cycles ago when they had first encountered the Ancients. Still, in that case, he would be alive.
But where?
She floated in the prowler, examining the planet below her, trying to trace the shapes of the landmasses under the clouds.
Frell! Out of nowhere came the thought, Why had he drawn them without clouds? She fumed. It made her work now that much harder.
This was not how she'd expected to come to Earth, back when she still thought she would visit John Crichton's homeworld. Back then, on Talyn with the other John, she'd thought, if they went, they would go together. He'd show her his world, all the things that had shaped him. She would meet his father in truth, at last, and his sisters, his friends, the people he loved. It had terrified and exhilarated her at the same time.
She closed her eyes against the unexpected tears, and remembered herself, and John, curled up on his bed on Talyn, his strong arms around her, his breath in her ear.
She had his notebook in her hands, casually flipping through it. So much of it was meaningless symbols -- she hadn't yet begun to study English. And the star charts, each with the bright star in the center labeled in the one English word she did know -- her name -- hadn't really caught her attention. They were too familiar for her to value them as something unique to this man who had turned her world upside down at the same time as he filled her heart and made her truly happy for the first time in her life.
And then, near the beginning of the notebook, she'd found the maps. Pages and pages of them. "What's this?" she had asked.
John had smiled and shaken his head. "Just Earth."
She had turned the pages more carefully then, looking at the pictures while John had nuzzled her neck. The first ones showed whole hemispheres, then continents, then smaller areas. She had seen similarities going from map to map as he had focussed in on certain areas, drawing in more and more detail. Curiously, she had asked, "Are they good? Accurate?"
He snorted. "Good enough for government work," he said, in that incomprehensible way he had, and then took pity on her and added, "I think they're pretty close. I don't think you could mount an invasion from them, but...."
She'd jabbed him with her elbow then, lightly, just to let him know what she thought of his teasing, and he'd let out an exaggerated "Oof!" and grabbed the book from her. Then he'd turned her around and kissed her, and she'd forgotten all about the maps for that afternoon....
Frell! Aeryn shook her head to bring herself back to the present.
After she'd lost John, she'd kept the notebook and poured over it, running her fingers over the pages, feeling the crinkled texture of the paper, studying his drawings of the world that had shaped him, before he'd fallen into her universe. She looked at the planet again as it rotated beneath her, trying to see the outlines below the white clouds, brown against blue, blue against brown. And slowly, gradually, she began to see forms she recognized.
Those two large continents, joined by a narrow strip of land in the middle, were the Americas. That large, curved coastline on the northern mass, John had called the Gulf Coast, and the thin strip, rounded at the bottom, that defined the right-hand side of the curve, that was called Florida.
She sighed. That was all well and good, but where should she go? Where should she look for one lone human among a planet full of them?
And once again, in her mind, she was back on Talyn, with John, a different afternoon. He was actually a little annoyed with her. He hadn't wanted to talk about his home that day, but she'd really wanted to know. It wasn't long after her mother's apparent death, and she really wanted to hear about his family, where they lived, where he came from.
"Please," she'd said.
And something of her need must have been in her voice, because he'd cocked his head and looked at her, measuring. And then he'd told her about his childhood, the different places he lived, and he'd relaxed as they talked, and she'd loved hearing the warmth in his voice, talking about his parents, his sisters, his friends.
And in the end he'd pulled out the notebook, found one of the maps, one of the detailed ones, and showed her his last link with the planet of his birth -- the place he called Florida, the last place he'd set foot on Earth. He'd tried to keep the sadness out of his voice, but she'd heard it.
And then he'd flipped the page and pointed out the location of a city called Houston, where he'd lived before the flight, doing his training for the mission at....she didn't remember the name. Something to do with IASA, some training facility--
Aeryn shook her head, annoyed. The name wouldn't come, and she wasn't sure what difference it would make, anyway. This was impossible. He could be anywhere on the frelling planet -- if he was even here at all. It made her stomach clench to think of the possibility, but she couldn't lie to herself. He might be on the other side of the galaxy.
She pounded her control panel in frustration, and let out a string of curses.
"You *are* a plague, John Crichton," she snarled, glaring at his entire planet. "I should have stayed away when I had the chance."
But she knew why she hadn't, knew that she loved him beyond hope, that she was less of herself without him, that she ached for him every moment when they were apart...and that he felt the same about her, even if right now that burden seemed to be too much for him to bear.
Instead of tears, that thought brought determination. She would simply have to find him if he was here, and, if he was not, then she would find a way to survive until he came for her, as she had no doubt that he would.
Sound strategy would be to seek allies -- and it occurred to her that she *had* a ready-made ally: John's father, Jack Crichton. The one human she "knew," in a sense. The one human who would surely know where John was, if he was a captive on this planet.
And thinking back on that afternoon with John, listening to his stories about his childhood and his family, she knew where to find Jack Crichton. Jack lived in Houston, the same as John, and worked for IASA. At least, he had when John had left. Surely she had enough information to find him, if that hadn't changed. Her English was getting better all the time; she was pretty sure she could make herself understood. She knew she looked human. And thanks to the Ancients and their false Earth, she had some idea how to get around.
She began ruthlessly ransacking her memory for anything at all, no matter how small, that John might have said about his father, IASA, or the city where they both lived and worked.
* * * * * * *
Aeryn stripped off the flight suit, which left her dressed in her usual black leather pants and a tank top. She stowed the suit and its helmet aboard her ship, then collected her survival pack, being sure to stash her comm badge in it in case someone from Moya should come looking for her.
She climbed down the ladder and examined the prowler critically. It was hidden in the long early morning shadows of a large stand of trees -- one of the few possible hiding places in an area that was mostly flat, dry and open -- and she thought it should be invisible from the air even at midday. If someone came by on foot, they would probably see it, but that couldn't be helped. The surrounding area appeared devoid of buildings, agriculture or mining, so with luck it would stay deserted. She checked once more that her badge was in a secure pocket of the pack, and that her pulse pistol was in easy reach, and then locked the cockpit. It would slow down any intruders, even the kind she remembered dismantling the transport pod from Moya on the false Earth.
Aeryn sighed, got her bearings, and headed for the nearest road to acquire transportation and make sure she was really in the right place.
She had entered the atmosphere on a semi-ballistic trajectory, aimed at the ocean John had called "Atlantic." After that she flew low towards the Gulf, hopefully below the range of ordinary scans. She followed the coastline in pre-dawn darkness to the large bay she was reasonably sure she recognized as the site of John's home, from her memory of his hand-drawn maps. She'd landed on the outskirts of the large city that occupied the coastal plain.
John had impressed on her that Houston was a coastal city, humid and probably too warm for Sebeceans much of the year, but her instrumentation indicated that it was within tolerances for her people just now. She hoped that would continue to be the case as the day wore on.
It was only a quarter-arn's walk from her landing site until she reached a large road filled with the ground transports John had called cars. She paralleled it a short distance to the side for a metra or so, hoping she would go unnoticed in the long shadows, until the road passed a small commerce center. She crouched down next to a large tree and observed the environment.
Under the trees was an open area with three rectangular tables, each with attached benches along both long sides. Next to that, separated from it by a low fence, was a long building divided into six businesses of some sort. Most of the stores appeared to be closed, with doors locked and lights out, but people were walking in and out of one that was labeled in bright letters, "KWIK-Mart." She puzzled over the pronunciation and the meaning. When she said it, the first part sounded like the word for "fast," but wasn't that spelled with a "Q"? Never mind. It certainly sold foodstuffs and other items, based on what the customers who were exiting carried. It was worth a look. It would be a test of her ability to blend in.
Seven humans in, four humans out so far. That meant at least three inside. Aeryn hesitated. Now that the time had come to actually mingle with the inhabitants of this planet, she was suddenly nervous. Frell. She was the superior being here, she told herself, no matter what John said about humans. The picture of him that sprang to mind, standing in that ridiculous get-up and ready to take on Traltixx single-handedly, made her smile. She took a deep breath, shook out her hair, and walked into the establishment. It was no larger than Moya's command deck, and had five or six rows of shelving containing what looked like food packets. There were food dispensers of various sorts along the walls.
No one showed more than passing interest in her, except for one man who looked her up and down and gave her a look she would have decked him for a few cycles ago, no matter how much attention that attracted. Now, she simply ignored him and thanked the fates that her clothing was close enough to native to pass. She relaxed then and walked to the back of the store, checking each aisle for humans. There were four customers. Most of them appeared to be near the entrance, pouring cups of some kind of hot beverage. There was one clerk at the counter taking currency in exchange for goods, a white-haired man who looked very bored to be there.
Aeryn contemplated simply pulling out her pulse pistol and appropriating local currency and a vehicle. The idea was extremely tempting. Once, as a Peacekeeper, she would have done exactly that -- simply taken what she needed, and to Hezmana with whether anyone was hurt or upset. But that was a long time ago, and a person she no longer was. And now she might still take what she needed, given that she was an alien on a xenophobic planet and she had no other options, but she would do it quietly and unobtrusively, if possible, and she would realize it was not her right to do it.
Luck was unaccustomedly with her. One of the women carelessly left her pack unattended while she went to ask the clerk a question. Aeryn walked over as casually as she could and quietly opened the bag. She extracted a smaller package which contained currency, and removed most of it. She hadn't even noticed the money John had appropriated back on the false Earth, and she had no real idea now of the value, but it made sense that the larger numbers indicated greater worth. She took the pieces of paper with the number "20" on them, and one that was labeled "100," leaving a little behind, and quickly stuffed everything back the way she found it. Chiana would no doubt have done it better and faster, but at least she'd managed to do it without attracting attention. Aeryn moved back down one aisle and began examining items on the shelf in what she hoped was a convincing manner.
When the victim headed back towards her bag, Aeryn headed to the door, intending to leave, but a display of maps on the counter next to the clerk caught her attention. There were several different maps, and one was labeled "Houston." She breathed a sigh of relief at final confirmation that she was in the right area, and then picked the map up and unfolded it.
While she was studying the map, trying to orient herself, the man behind the counter growled, "You gonna pay for that?"
Aeryn looked up, startled, and said, "What?" in Sebecean, realizing at once what she'd done. She would have to be careful about that. Language had never been an issue before. She smiled in what she hoped was a winning way and dredged up the English word. "What?"
Apparently it was good enough, because he simply repeated, "You want to buy that?"
"I need a.... map," she told him carefully in English.
"Foreigner, huh? Interesting accent," he told her, and then went on, "That one's $2.95."
Well, now she knew that a human other than Crichton understood her English. That was another nagging worry gone. She waited impatiently while he took currency from another customer. When she had the clerk's attention again, Aeryn held the map out and asked, "Where is... here?"
"On the map?" he asked.
"Yes," she said with more patience than she felt. Where else? "Can you show me?" she asked.
"Well, let me see that, young lady." He took the map from her and set it on the counter in front of him. "The missus usually handles the maps in our family, but...." He studied the map briefly while Aeryn fidgeted. "Ah, here," he said after a moment, pointing to the intersection of two large roads.
Aeryn made a mental note of the spot, and took the map back from him.
"You want anything else?" he asked, glancing at the door as a new customer entered the store.
She looked around to see if there was something else she wanted to get, since she was making a purchase. So much was unfamiliar. There were foodcubes in her survival pack, and it was probably safer and easier to eat those just now than to make a bad choice of local foods, but one word popped into her head. "Do you have chok-lat?" she heard herself ask.
The clerk looked at her oddly then, and she was afraid she'd said something wrong. But he just snorted and said, "Boy, you *are* a foreigner. Over there," he said, and he pointed over to a large rack filled with colorfully-wrapped bars. "Take your pick."
Aeryn followed his gaze, and gave him an embarrassed grin. "Thank you," she said, and walked over to the display, carrying the half-folded map with her. She looked with dismay at perhaps seventy-five different items. Surely they weren't all chocolate?
She surveyed the multitude of packages in growing annoyance. John would have simply reached out and laid his hand on one and said, "Here, baby, try this! You'll love it. Ambrosia. Nectar of the gods!"
And just like that her mood went from annoyance to tears. Frell. This whole thing was an insanely bad idea. She should have stayed in space.
Furious with herself, she whirled around to leave, but the clerk was watching her with suddenly suspicious eyes, and she quickly shoved her emotions, all of them, down into the bottom of her mind so she could think straight. She might be on Earth, but proprietors of markets were the same everywhere. She needed to make a decision and buy something! She scanned the wrappers, and realized quickly enough that most of the bars had many different food items mixed with the chocolate. With relief, she found one that was labeled with a name that sounded familiar: Hershey. She thought she'd heard John say that once. The bars were flat, and seemed to be plain chocolate. They would do.
She grabbed three, and took them, along with the map, up to the counter and paid for them, settling any concerns the clerk had had. She took her change and her purchases, and walked outside.
Aeryn squinted at the sky, guessing the time of day to be midmorning. The sun was getting higher, but the temperature was still comfortable. Grateful for small favors, she walked to the end of the building and stepped over the fence to reach the tables next door. She settled on a bench, putting her pack on the bench beside her.
She started to put all three chocolate bars into her pack, and then changed her mind and put one of them on the table in front of her instead. She spread the map out, located her current position, and concluded she was definitely some distance outside of the city of Houston. She wasn't sure of the scale of the map, but she was obviously going to have to gain ground transportation.
She looked at the cars in front of the KWIK-Mart. There were four of them there now, all of them unattended, but none of them running. Starting them without the required key could be time consuming, if she remembered right from her flight with John back on the Earth the Ancients had created. Her time spent as a fugitive on Moya had taught her many skills, but she'd never actually had to use that one.
And then Zhaan's goddess smiled on her again. A man drove up and stopped his car just across the fence from where she was sitting. He got out, leaving the engine running, and walked quickly into the store, presumably to grab something...KWIK. As the door opened, a loud string of profanity borne on a female voice emerged, and Aeryn realized with a guilty start that her victim must have discovered the loss of her currency. Other loud voices followed, and she realized that everyone in the store was almost certainly diverted by the drama.
Without even thinking, she grabbed the chocolate bar and the map, swung her pack over her shoulder, and headed straight for the driver's side of the vehicle that had so generously been left for her. She tossed everything onto the seat beside her and ran her eyes and hands over the controls.
The vehicle wasn't all that different from others she'd driven from time to time, and she was lurching out into the flow of traffic long before its owner came back to claim it.
She had the nagging feeling that the flow of traffic had been reversed in "Australia," but traffic going towards Houston was definitely on the right side of the road, and she accepted that. By the time she'd traveled a few metras, she'd tried out the basic features of the vehicle and was moving smoothly. The traffic laws, she would have to pick up as she went along, from observing other drivers. She hoped other humans weren't as careless of rules as Crichton was, or that was going to be difficult!
Feeling extremely pleased with herself, Aeryn reached one hand for the chocolate bar lying on the seat next to her. As a reward for her efforts, she unwrapped it and broke a chunk off as she continued to control the car with the other hand.
She popped the confection in her mouth as she passed a large transport vehicle -- and realized immediately she'd made a mistake.
Because the smooth sweet candy was delicious, and it was like nothing she'd ever tasted, and it was *chocolate* -- and she should have been sharing it with John, or at least she should have taken the time to savor it, not popped it into her mouth while her attention was diverted by driving an unfamiliar ground vehicle and trying to figure out where the Hezmana she was and how she was going to find a man she didn't really even know.
But John wouldn't give up, and neither would she.
She swallowed the chocolate with an achy throat and wiped the tears out of her eyes, and drove on towards Houston proper to look for Jack Crichton.
* * * * * * *
Aeryn stood looking out the window of the second-floor motel room she'd rented for the night, following John's example from that long-ago time in "Australia." The room was basic, and clean, and it served her needs, especially once she'd figured out how to adjust the air recycler to cool it down, and how to turn the lights on and off.
There wasn't much of a view, just other buildings, none of them very attractive. But the sunset made the sky a pretty color, and she knew John would have had something to say about it. She sighed and took a pull on the bottle of beer she held. She couldn't decide if the day had gone well or badly, but at least she seemed to be able to pass successfully for human.
She'd had several near-misses in the traffic driving into town, but her pilot's reflexes kept her and her vehicle from harm. After she had successfully rented quarters for the night, she'd carefully parked the stolen car out of easy view of the street, assuming the authorities would have been alerted. A prowler had an ident beacon that broadcast continually, making one that went missing easy to find; she didn't think the humans had anything approaching that level of technology, so hopefully if she were careful for a few days, it would be all right.
She shook her head and returned to her current predicament.
Tomorrow she would have to find a way to locate the IASA facility and look for Jack Crichton in earnest, but today had been...overwhelming. She had been totally unprepared for the sheer *numbers* of humans on the streets in Houston at midday, silly, head-in-the-sand humans with no idea of the dangers waiting for them out in space -- so much like John when she first knew him that she very nearly sat down and cried.
Since then she'd been trying not to think about John, because it wasn't helping her focus.
She was reluctant to call too much attention to herself by asking strangers about IASA, especially since she still couldn't remember the name of the facility where John's father worked. Where John had done his mission training.
In the end, she'd decided to count today as a day to acclimatize to the culture here, and pick up some more basic necessities. Like the beer she was drinking now. She smiled ruefully, remembering John telling her to just drink the beer, before he'd.....Ah, frell, Aeryn Sun, she told herself. You are an idiot. No thinking about John!
Tired, cranky, and now frustrated with herself as well, Aeryn turned away from the sunset, walked back across the room, beer bottle in hand, and turned on the television set. She could at least listen to the English underneath the translations her microbes provided, see if she could improve the accent that those few humans she'd interacted with today had commented on.
She got an image immediately, but it took her a few microts' fiddling to get the sound level adjusted to something comfortable. She let the sound wash over her for a little while, and then noticed she'd emptied her bottle of beer. Frell it. Maybe what she needed tonight was to get good and drunk. She collected another bottle of beer, replacing the empty bottle in the carton, and went back to sit on the end of the bed to watch the television. The program seemed to be reports of happenings around the planet, and especially Houston itself. It was interrupted from time to time by what she remembered John calling commercials, trying to convince her to buy things.
The distinctive cadence of English swirled around her, and she tried to focus on it, but she was too tired, especially with the frenetic pace of the ads. The accents sounded different anyway, like John did sometimes when he was tired or upset. She set her beer down long enough to pull off her pants and sat back down on the bed, cross-legged, in her underwear and tank top. The news program came back on, and she concentrated again -- and then, suddenly, her heart stopped. There he was. On the television.
John Crichton.
On the television, right there in front of her.
Even as she was telling herself it was the beer, making her see things, she knew it wasn't.
She was across the room and her hand was on the smooth glass where his face was before she remembered she should be listening to what he was saying....
On the television, John chuckled and ducked his head. Whatever the disembodied voice she'd been ignoring had said, had embarrassed him. "Well, it's not really original to DK and me. We're just building on the work of others." His eyes widened in an attempt to look innocent. "And I'm just the test pilot, DK's the real brains."
The camera pulled back, and she could see there was another man sitting next to him. John was dressed in a brightly colored shirt, light pants. His companion, dark hair longer than John's, was dressed similarly. Was that DK?
The other man nodded towards John and said with a grin, "He's way too modest. The idea of a spacecraft using a planet's natural gravity to overcome atmospheric friction and exponentially increase its speed came from John's brain." He looked back at the interviewer. "I only refined it a little."
The two men exchanged a look and laughed as if sharing some huge private joke.
And as Aeryn watched, her hope and excitement turned to dismay. Because she remembered that face....full of laughter and hope and innocence. This was the man she met aboard Moya -- four cycles ago -- or very nearly him. Certainly not the battle-scarred and hardened and *damaged* man who vanished through a wormhole only a solar day ago.
She watched as he and DK continued to talk exuberantly about their upcoming Farscape One mission, and tried to understand what it meant. Unless someone was frelling with her mind, as had so often been done to John, the most obvious explanation was that she had somehow arrived at Earth *before John left*.
Frell! She'd had no idea that a wormhole could take her through time as well as space.... How much else had John neglected to tell her about wormholes?
She continued to watch the screen, stunned, trying to pull her thoughts together.
The interviewer asked, "Commander Crichton, will your father be at the Cape for your launch next month?"
And Aeryn saw the tiny tightening in his jaw that betrayed, to her eyes, anyway, the complex relationship John had with his father. But his eyes never dimmed, and he said, "Well, actually, yes, my dad is going to be at the Cape for the launch, and he'll be serving as back-up controller in case my buddy here gets into trouble." John chuckled again, and DK good-naturedly punched him in the arm.
The interviewer thanked the two men, and wrapped up with the statement that John and DK were still in Houston, preparing for the upcoming mission.
Aeryn stared at the screen for a few microts after John's smooth, relaxed face vanished, and then before she could talk herself out of it, she pulled on her pants and boots, grabbed the map of Houston, and raced down the outside stairs and across the parking lot to the front desk of the motel.
The woman behind the counter looked startled when the door burst open, but Aeryn simply slapped the map down in front of her and demanded, "IASA! Where is it?" in a tone that allowed no denial.
* * * * * * * *
"Is everything all right, honey?" the clerk asked in concern, looking from Aeryn to the map and back. "Can I help?"
Aeryn remembered that she did want help from the plump blonde woman who had helped her fill out the registration form earlier when she arrived. What was her name? Jean? Regrouping, she said, "I'm sorry, um, Jean. Mmmm.... the map is....hard." She pointed to it again and asked more graciously, "Where is IASA?"
"Oh," Jean said, understanding appearing in her voice. "Are you a space buff?"
Aeryn hoped that the translator microbes had got that right. "Yes," she said. "I like...to learn."
Jean smiled at her, then pointed to a spot on the map and said, "Well, this here's JSC."
When Aeryn looked at her blankly, she elaborated, "Johnson Space Center. That's the IASA center here in Houston. Everyone just calls it JSC."
Although Aeryn still couldn't pinpoint the name in her memory, that sounded like it might be right. If it was the only IASA facility in Houston, it had to be right. While Aeryn was thinking, Jean asked, "You planning on taking the tour then?"
"Tour?" Aeryn asked her.
"You meet at the Visitor's Center, right here" -- and she pointed to an entrance on the south side of the facility -- "and you get a real nice tour of the place. If you're lucky, you'll even get to see an astronaut or two!"
Aeryn brightened perceptibly at the prospect of being able to get into IASA without having to break in.
Jean noticed the smile, and said helpfully, "There's a couple nice brochures about the tours on that rack over there." She pointed back in the direction of the door Aeryn had come through. "They have the hours and everything."
"Thank you," Aeryn told her, starting for the rack. Then a thought struck her. Jean lived on this world, she would know if there was a way to find out where someone lived. She turned back around and said, "Can I get....find....someone? A friend?"
"You need a phone number?"
What the frell was a phone number? "A....home?"
Jean brightened. "Oh, an address! There's a phone directory in your room, honey. Just look up their name. If they're not unlisted, it should have their number, and probably their address, too."
Phone book. Okay. She'd figure that out back in her room. "Thank you," Aeryn told her, and stopping at the rack to pick up the indicated brochures, she headed back up to her room.
The information run had helped calm her swirling emotions, which she was glad of. She had a lot to think about if she was going to have a plan in place for the morning. When she reentered the room, she cleared the beer and other items off of the small table, pouring what remained in the unfinished beer bottle down the drain in the bathroom.
Then she searched the room for the 'phone book,' presuming it would be made of paper like John's notebook. She found it in a drawer she hadn't opened before, and tried to look up both Jack and John Crichton. It was a challenge for her English alphabetization skills, but she reluctantly concluded that they both must have had their information 'unlisted.'
All right, she was no worse off than she'd been.
She spread the map out on the table, mentally marking the place where she'd left her prowler, her current location, and the site of the IASA compound. Now, what was she going to do?
The one thing she was certain of was that she would go to IASA tomorrow. Beyond that, what did she know for sure?
She was on Earth.
It appeared she was here before John Crichton had left the planet four cycles in her past.
It seemed likely that her John -- the man from her 'present,' anyway, she thought with a twinge -- was not here. At least, he was not on the planet in the custody of his people. Otherwise, his younger self wouldn't be on television talking about his planned mission. By all accounts -- well, John's, at least -- these people were too paranoid not to take the astronaut into custody as well while they tried to figure out what was going on, if they'd captured an older version of John Crichton claiming to have lived on the other side of the galaxy for four cycles.
The thought of John having to face himself again made her stomach churn, and she preferred to assume he wasn't here.
She pulled her shoulders backwards and then rolled them upwards, trying to ease some of the tension in her body.
All right. The younger John was here in Houston, as was his friend DK. She smiled for a moment, thinking of the affection that had been obvious between the two on the television. No wonder John had missed DK so much.
What about Jack Crichton? No guarantees, but she knew he lived in Houston at the time John was in training, and the woman on the television had suggested that Jack might "go" to Florida next monen. He was probably here as well.
She had no idea where they lived, but she could probably find Jack, John, or even DK at the IASA compound.
Should she contact any of them? If so, who?
It wasn't like she could walk up to John and say, "Hi, I'm Aeryn Sun. In a monen you're going to get shot through a wormhole and ruin my life and make me love you." He'd certainly never believe her. And even if he did....
Maybe when he flew his mission, she could follow him in her prowler, use his wormhole to get back to the Uncharted Territories?
But that would mean that she'd be back where she was four cycles ago -- she had no desire to meet up with the Officer Aeryn Sun she'd been at that time. And where would she go? The world she knew, the friends she had now, didn't exist back then. And how could there be two of her anyway?
She rubbed her forehead and then ran her fingers through her hair. This time shift stuff was definitely going to give her a headache.
She decided to let it be for now. Tomorrow she would go to the place where John worked, because she knew she *had* to see him, if only from a distance. Perhaps she would see Jack as well, and could follow one or both of them to their home and find out where they lived.
She would make more plans when she had more information.
She yawned as she stood up. It was definitely time to sleep. She was exhausted, she still had alcohol in her bloodstream, and she had to be alert tomorrow.
Aeryn peeled off the rest of her clothes, set her pulse pistol under her pillow, turned the lights out, and crawled into bed. She expected her swirling thoughts to keep her awake, but her military training kicked in. She needed sleep -- so she slept.
* * * * * * * *
Aeryn woke the following morning just after daybreak, coming instantly alert.
Earth.
She was on Earth.
Without John.
She sighed, and stretched, and got out of the bed, stashing her pulse pistol back in her pack before getting into the shower. So far things had gone smoothly, but primitive worlds were often the most dangerous, just because they were so unpredictable. Best to be prepared to run.
She showered quickly and dressed, thinking as she did that if she were on this frelling planet much longer, she'd need to acquire more than just the basic change of underwear and socks that her survival pack held. How long would the funds she'd stolen last?
John wouldn't approve of a one-woman crime spree.
"Well, Crichton," she advised him in absentia while tying her hair back in a ponytail, "you'll just have to come and stop me, won't you?"
She really hoped he would.
All right, Aeryn Sun, that's enough self-pity, she told herself briskly. You know where you're going, you have an objective, time to get moving! She quickly ate a food cube and washed it down with a glass of water, then headed for the car.
She followed the highway numbered 45 to IASA Road and ended up at the visitor's parking lot without incident. She was there before the center was open, so she took the opportunity to drive all the way around the perimeter of compound, looking for other entrances, other parking areas that John, or Jack, or DK might use. There were an awful lot of them.
The next time she drove past the visitor's entrance, it was open, and she parked and gratefully got out of the vehicle. She leaned back in and grabbed her pack, shut the door firmly, then looked around at her surroundings. There were a lot of buildings, lots of grass and trees between them. It was a rather pretty setting, as planetary settings went, but she had no idea which buildings might contain training facilities, or offices, or anything else John Crichton might be using.
Frell. She was not going to panic. He'd gone into a gammack base for her; she'd gone into a shadow depository for him. She'd figure this out, too.
Next to the car park was a display of early human vehicles used to put things into orbit. Rockets, it seemed they were called, from the signs labeling them. They were enormous, especially one which was called a Saturn. All that to get something smaller than her prowler off the planet? Humans *were* insane. Or very, very determined. That was actually a scary thought.
Aeryn shook her head and headed off to join a tour.
The knowledge that John had been in this place -- *was* in this place -- made it more interesting to her than something so primitive would ordinarily have been. A rather young male guide took her group of about a dozen people into something called the Shuttle Training Facility, and told them that there were several astronauts working there at that very moment, though he didn't know who. She looked around eagerly, in hopes that one of them might be John. She remembered him talking about the Farscape One being launched on a ship he called a Shuttle. Fortunately, the other members of her tour seemed just as interested in astronauts as she was, so she didn't stand out.
The astronauts in question were some distance away, but Aeryn could tell easily that none of the three was John Crichton, or anyone else she might recognize, which included only Jack Crichton and DK in addition to John. Disappointed, she continued to follow along, scanning the rest of the compound as she walked.
There was a temporary training area for the Farscape One project, Aeryn learned from the guide's brisk commentary, but they would not be allowed to visit it, as it was in use. How that was different from the Shuttle Training Facility they *had* been allowed to visit, she couldn't tell, but she marked the location of the building in her mind and planned to come back later in the day when John might be leaving.
She needed to see him, see that he was truly here. She'd decide what to do next after she found him.
Aeryn spent the rest of the tour observing the facility with an eye towards infiltration once she was on her own.
When the tour was over, the group was left to fend for themselves at a museum of American space exploration. Aeryn was going to skip it and move on when a young woman who'd been on her tour stopped in front of one of the many portraits on the walls and announced to her companion, "Look at this one! John Crichton! He's going to fly the Farscape mission!"
Curious, Aeryn walked over to look when the others moved on. There he was, with that smiling face. Even younger, she thought, than he'd been on the television last night. She puzzled out the information on the plaque under the picture. It listed two missions, presumably before this upcoming one. The photograph must have been taken before one of those.
When she realized that the photographs were a chronological gallery of American astronauts, she couldn't help herself -- she went looking for Jack Crichton. She passed quite a few portraits before she found him. He looked a good deal younger than he had on the two occasions she had 'met' him, much nearer John's present age, she thought, but he was recognizable. His dark hair was cropped short as John often wore his. And she could see a good deal of John in Jack Crichton.
She shook her head. It was the other way around, of course -- a good deal of the father in the son.... John, the one she'd lost, had wanted her to meet his father. Would the child she carried look like John? Like Jack? Do not go there, Aeryn Sun....
Near Jack's portrait was a model of the rocket that had propelled him and twenty other humans to the Earth's moon, three at a time. She was astonished to realize that the huge Saturn rocket she'd seen on her way in was a much smaller cousin of that rocket. Humans were definitely insane.
And you're not? she asked herself with wry amusement. Then what are you doing on this dirtball in the first place, wandering around like you belong here? She turned back towards the entrance.
Enough of the museum. A tech would love this, but it wasn't getting her any closer to John, or Jack, or DK.
To pass the time, she bought a midday meal at a food stand outside the museum. She puzzled over the menu for a few microts and let one of her fellow tourists go ahead of her, until she realized that "pizza" was what Crichton called "peets-a." He always spoke of it with longing, so she assumed he liked it. She got a slice, and added some kind of juice. It was basically a kind of sandwich, she realized: bread, with cheese and some kind of meat, and a sauce.
She bit into the peets-a and tried to decide if she liked it. She wasn't at all sure. The flavors were different, and a bit odd together. But it was food and it filled the belly, and she ate it, trying to decide what to do now that the tour was over. No one tried to talk to her, for which she was grateful.
She considered. This was at least a somewhat secure facility. Nothing like she'd expect if it were a military base, even on Earth, but there were fences around the outside with sharp twisted wire on top, and guards, and everyone wore identification badges. She wasn't going to get very far if she wasn't very careful. The badges, she had noted during the tour, also served as keys to open the doors to the buildings.
Still, places like this, if you walked purposefully, people usually assumed you knew what you were doing and left you alone. She put the remains of her meal into a refuse container, picked up her pack, and began to walk.
She spent several hours walking from building to building, learning the layout of the center, always circling back near where she'd been told the Farscape simulator was. She tried not to be obvious that she was looking for someone; once, she caught a tall blond man in a uniform eyeing her with something that might have been suspicion. She flashed him a bright smile and held her breath.
Apparently it was enough to allay his concerns, but it made her more nervous about waiting out in the open.
Frell it. She decided to take the risk of scooting into the simulator building right behind two people with the requisite badges, hoping that no one would notice she didn't have one herself.
It worked, and, elated, she began to search the building, looking for the simulator. The ground floor seemed most likely, and she walked carefully around the perimeter corridors. She'd been around two sides and seen nothing, when a door at the far end of the hallway opened and two men came out, heads together, talking seriously. After a brief pause, they headed towards the exit at that end of the building.
And her breath caught, because one of the two was definitely John! She'd recognize the posture, the body language, even the barely-heard voice, anywhere.
Just as she forced herself to breathe again, and started to take a step towards the two men, a female voice sounded, very close by.
The voice was brisk and businesslike. "Do you have your ID, Ma'am?"
Aeryn saw John head out the door as she turned to deal with the voice, hoping she wouldn't have to pull out her pulse pistol.
* * * * * * * *
Aeryn turned around to see a woman near her height and build, dressed in the same uniform as the guard who had noticed her earlier. She was armed with a handgun that probably used the "lead" projectiles John talked about. Aeryn tried to look surprised. "Sorry?" she said, an apology and a question at the same time.
"I need to see your badge," the woman repeated. "This is a restricted area."
Of course it was. Aeryn shook her head. "I don't have one....no badge," she said. "Tour."
The guard eyed her skeptically. "You were on the tour?"
Aeryn smiled brightly and nodded. "On the tour! I got....lost." If she was really lucky, the woman would escort her back to the visitor center and that would be the end of it and she would be able to catch up with John.
But, of course, she had the usual luck she had with anything connected with Crichton.
The guard was shaking her head almost before Aeryn finished the sentence. "I'm sorry, you'll have to come with me to the security office," she said, pleasantly but firmly. "Hopefully we can sort this out quickly."
Well, that was that. Aeryn couldn't allow herself to get boxed in by security, and she was acutely conscious of the microts passing as John surely got further and further away from the building. She feigned falling in line with the guard, making sure that the hallway was empty. The woman relaxed ever so slightly, and when she did, Aeryn simply took her down with a Pantak jab.
The guard dropped with a pleasing thud.
The nearest unlocked door proved to be a stairwell, which was a better hiding place for the unconscious body than nothing. Even a little delay in pursuit would help. Aeryn quickly dragged her in, then snatched up her pack again and ran for the glass exit door through which John had disappeared.
Standing in front of the building, she scanned the open space between buildings. There were a few people walking, but none of them was John, she was sure of it. She was breathing hard, more from fear of losing contact with him than exertion, even as she automatically took off around the corner of the lab in the direction of the nearest parking lot.
This time, luck was with her. She'd only run a hundred motras or so when she saw him, down a walkway, heading for a different parking area than the one she'd been going towards. She slowed to a walk, and followed him out to where he'd left his car, grateful that he was leaving.
Crichton's leisurely pace gave her time to think. She had several choices, including approaching him there in the parking lot, trying to get back to her vehicle in time to catch him on the road before he got too far away, and simply taking another vehicle from this lot and following him out.
As much as her heart wanted to walk right up and talk to him here and now, not take the risk of losing him, her head said it was a bad idea. This John Crichton didn't know her, wasn't tied to her, had no reason to trust her -- with his life if not his heart. And this was not a place to introduce herself, try to have a casual conversation, take the measure of this man.
So, that meant following him. She discarded the idea of going back to her stolen vehicle almost immediately. The longer she used it, the more likely it was to be found by the authorities, and she had planned to abandon it this evening anyway. Besides, the visitor's lot was some distance away. She had no guarantee she could get there and onto the road in time to follow Crichton to his destination. So, that left option three -- appropriate another vehicle.
Option three had two choices to go along with it: Try to start the car without a key, or approach one of the few humans also in the car park and take his or her keys and vehicle. Taking the key from someone meant that there would be someone to report the theft soon, even if she knocked them out or tied them up. If she took an unattended vehicle, it might be arns before the owner came looking for it.
She looked across the parking area at John, who'd stopped to talk with someone and hadn't yet entered his own vehicle. She had time to try to warm wire the car. Burn? Frelling English. It didn't matter what the technique was called. John had taught her how to do it on a ground vehicle on Lihan 7, and he'd said it would work on Earth cars. It hadn't occurred to her at the time to wonder how he knew that.
Now....she very definitely wondered! She would have to ask him one day....
She chose a vehicle that looked average, something that she hoped wouldn't call attention to her, and, with one more glance at John, who seemed to be about done talking, proceeded to gain access to it and get the engine running. By the time John was ready to leave, so was she.
* * * * * * * *
Typically, Crichton hadn't gone home, as she'd wanted him to, so that she could perhaps speak to him privately. No. He'd pulled into a parking lot not far from the IASA facility, and had gotten out of his car and entered what was evidently a bar.
Aeryn sat in her new stolen vehicle, debating whether to follow him in. She didn't know how long it might be before the owner of 'her' car reported it missing, and she was still awfully close to the scene of the crime, as John might have called it.
She sighed. "I'm not going to lose you now, Crichton," she muttered to herself. She found the darkest corner of the parking lot for the vehicle, and took down her ponytail to change her appearance in case he had seen her at IASA. Then, keeping her pack with her, she nervously entered the bar.
She almost sagged with relief at how comfortable she felt once she was actually in the establishment. There were only humans as patrons, of course, but the room felt like many a tavern she'd visited. A few tables, a counter with the barkeeper behind it, low lighting.... Something John would undoubtedly have told her was music was playing at a volume that still allowed for conversation. This was a comfortable, friendly place, with groups talking together and drinking, not a place that catered to those who were nearing despair. Aeryn smiled to herself and took two steps into the room.
She looked around casually. It was still early in the evening, and it wasn't too crowded. She spied John Crichton, astronaut, almost immediately. He was sitting at the bar, with a brown bottle she assumed was beer in his hand. He was bouncing slightly in time with the music and occasionally glanced over at the door. His eyes slid past her once, and then returned. He smiled admiringly, that friendly, open smile she remembered, and then looked away, apparently unaware of the tumult in her heart.
Aeryn's stomach fluttered and her knees were threatening to give out, so she backed quietly towards the wall. But even then, she couldn't tear her eyes off of him. He was so beautiful! Would it be so wrong to talk to him?
If she understood her situation properly, in less than a monen this man was going to be dumped into her world, and would meet up with a younger version of herself -- and he'd never given any sign that he'd seen her before. So, what would happen if she changed that? If she got to know him now? Would things be different? Ooof. There was that time headache again. She wanted a drink.
And frell it, if she only talked to him briefly, it shouldn't make any difference. He'd be seeing her in a completely different context in that cell on Moya. Surely he wouldn't make the connection.
Even before she knew she'd made the decision, she was crossing the room.
John's wandering gaze caught her as she drew near him. He watched her with just a little caution, not sure if she was approaching him or not. She knew from experience with his older self that he most definitely found her attractive....and she didn't dare play on that. She didn't want him to think she was looking for a recreating partner -- and she especially didn't want him to try to take her up on it.
There was an open seat next to him, and she stopped in front of it. "Hi," she said. "Can I sit here?"
He blinked, cocked his head, and smiled at her again. "Actually," he said, "I'm meeting someone."
"Girlfriend?" she asked, struggling to keep her voice even. She was surprised at how sharp a pain the thought of John with another woman, even here in the past, brought to her heart.
John shook his head and chuckled. "I wish! No, just a buddy. I'm *way* too busy for a love life right now."
Aeryn smiled, and nodded, still standing in front of the tall chair, not wanting to presume to take his friend's place.
"Where's my manners," John said suddenly, surprising her. "Have a seat, DK can stand when he gets here. You want a drink?" he offered as the bartender came by behind the counter.
"I'd like a beer," she said, pointing at John's. The bartender brought her a bottle and she paid for it. No sense complicating things. As it was, she was wondering what she was doing here, trying to hold a conversation in a language she barely knew with the man she loved -- who had never met her before.
He was looking at her again, speculatively, and she thought she knew roughly what he was going to say, but he surprised her. "You're not from around here, are you?" he asked.
She threw her head back and laughed at the irony of the question. "No," she told him, grinning like an idiot. "Nowhere around here."
She could tell her reaction puzzled him, but she simply took a gulp of her beer, and enjoyed sitting here, half an arm's length from him.
After a moment, John looked away and she saw his gaze settle on someone. She followed his line of sight and saw that DK had entered the bar. Across the room, John's best friend pointed in Aeryn's direction and mouthed something to John. She wasn't quite sure of all the words, without the sounds to go with them, but the intent was clear: "You want me to go?"
She waited to see what would happen.
Without even thinking about it, John waved his friend over. DK shrugged and ambled across the room. He ordered a beer and looked to John for introductions.
John, realizing he hadn't asked her name, improvised in the best Crichton fashion. "DK, this is, um....?" He gestured towards her, giving her the opportunity to fill in the blanks.
"Aeryn," she told him, and he nodded.
"Erin," he said to DK. "This is Erin." Looking back at her he added, "I'm John, and this is DK."
"Hello," she said, wondering what to do next. And then she knew. If there was one thing she remembered vividly from that very first day on Moya, it was John, holding his hand out to her -- just before she threw him across the room. She pursed her lips in a private smile at the memory, and extended her hand to Crichton.
He took it with an easy grin, and she almost couldn't bring herself to let him go -- and she sensed a reluctance on his part as well. Was that spark between them real, or was she just letting her imagination run away with her? Frell.
She made herself let go, and shook DK's hand as well, and then, because she was curious about their friendship, and their working partnership, she tried to ask a question to get them talking. "You're friends," she said, and gestured back and forth between them.
Something in her tone must have given the word a meaning she didn't intend, because before she could continue, DK backed up slightly with an embarrassed grin on his face, and John nearly sprayed his beer out of his mouth. "No!" John said emphatically. "No, no, no, no, no!"
She blinked at them. "You're not friends? But you said...a buddy?"
"Well," John said, glancing at DK, "we're not friends." He put a slight emphasis on the word, and she realized belatedly they thought she meant they were lovers. Now, there was a thought that had never entered her mind.
"Frelling English," Aeryn muttered under her breath, and they both stared at her. "I'm sorry," she said. "English is....hard."
John looked at her as if realizing for the first time that her English was limited. Instead of asking where she was from, which is what she expected from that look in his eyes, he simply tried to answer her question. "We've known each other, as my Grandpa Mack used to say, since we were both knee-high to a grasshopper," he said, and put his hand out as if to measure a distance about half a motra from the ground. When she smiled, he continued. "We work at IASA. We're scientists. Boring, huh?"
A scientist. Not an astronaut? She'd heard the phrase, "John Crichton, Astronaut" so often, she'd come to associate it with his Earth past. She frowned, trying to understand this peculiarity.
DK apparently misunderstood her expression, and rushed to John's defense. "Don't let him kid you, he's an astronaut. He's going up in the Shuttle next month. I'm the boring scientist."
"Hey," John objected, though Aeryn couldn't imagine why. DK apparently understood, because the two men exchanged a look that could only be described as "meaningful."
Into the silence Aeryn announced, "I'm a pilot." When they looked at her in surprise, she elaborated, "A fighter pilot. I love to fly. Very fast."
John eyed her with renewed curiosity. "Gotta admit," he said, "I love to fly." He grinned at DK.
"Me too," DK said. "Just not with you."
"Ah, DK, it was only a little bitty barrel roll." John didn't look the least bit sorry about the incident, and DK didn't seem to regret whatever it was, however much he complained about it. It told her a lot about their relationship. It made her heart ache to see how comfortable he was in this other life. She told herself his friendship with D'Argo must fill some of what he'd lost.
She opened her mouth and almost told him she could fly rings around him, in Sebecean, no less, before she caught herself and closed her mouth again. She realized that she was going to have to leave. This was making her crazy. It was worse, in a way, than coming back to Moya after the other John's death, because the John Crichton she faced there, she had a history with. This man, for all that he was John Crichton, was a stranger, and she had no idea how to deal with him.
"I'm sorry," she said abruptly. "I have to go." She hopped off the chair she'd been sitting on and reached for her pack.
John and DK exchanged a look she knew all too well from her own face when dealing with John over the past few cycles. The look said, "She's crazy, man."
She gave John an apologetic smile, and said "Good-bye" to DK.
She hadn't gotten more than three steps when she heard John's voice behind her.
"Hey, Erin. Wait up a minute," he said.
The hurt tone brought her to a halt. She took a deep breath and turned to face him.
He'd been reaching one hand out towards her, and now he dropped it awkwardly to his side. "I'm sorry if we said something to upset you."
"No," she told him gently. "I ... have to go," she repeated, wishing she could explain better.
He looked in her eyes then, searching for something, and then nodded in acceptance. "Okay. Look," he said, and paused as if searching for words. "I do have a mission coming up, and my life's really crazy right now. But...I'd really like to call you when things settle down. Can I have your phone number?"
She could feel the tears threatening, and she knew if she didn't get out quickly, she would be crying in his arms, and she absolutely couldn't do that. But she couldn't bear to hurt his feelings, either. She chose her words carefully and said, "I'm sorry. I...I don't live here."
"That's okay," he said. "I just thought..." He clamped his mouth shut on whatever it was he had intended to say, and then said instead, "Now I'm the one who's sorry."
He smiled regretfully and went back to his friend, and she turned and fled, because *that* was so much like John trying to deal with her all those cycles on Moya, that it broke her heart.
She risked one last glance at him from the doorway. His eyes were on her, and he was chewing on his thumb, oblivious to whatever DK was telling him.
When she reached the relative safety of the car, she leaned her head forward onto the steering wheel and sobbed.
* * * * * * * *
Furious with herself, Aeryn drove back to the motel, leaving the car once again in the darkest corner of the parking lot. She hoped the helpful desk clerk wouldn't notice she'd returned with a different vehicle. She caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror as she entered the room, and was appalled at how bedraggled she looked. Her eyes were puffy from crying, there were tearstains on her cheeks, and her hair was tangled, at least where she could see it. Frell.
So far since she'd been on this planet, she'd been reacting, indulging herself, giving in to the emotional effect that just being on John Crichton's homeworld gave her. It was time to pull herself together and deal with this insane situation, instead of letting it control her. You are stronger than this, Aeryn Sun!
First things first -- deal with the immediate environment. The room was stuffy after being closed up all day, and she turned on the air recycler. The background hum of the equipment made the quiet room feel more like home. Then she took a shower, the hottest she could stand, and toweled the excess water from her hair, nibbling on a food cube as she did so. By the time she was done, she felt much more in control of herself.
She turned the television on low for more background noise, then, without bothering to put her leather pants on, she plopped herself down in a large padded chair to think. First a quick recap, or what John called "previously on..."
Fact: She was on Earth, a hideously backward planet half the frelling galaxy away from her home, alone, with only her prowler for transportation -- assuming it hadn't been discovered.
Fact: So far, at least, she'd had no contact from Moya, or the John Crichton who had been sucked into a wormhole shortly before she was. And she had no idea if he had found his way back to Moya.
Fact: She needed a wormhole to get back home. If Crichton and/or Moya didn't show up with a way to make or predict a wormhole, she was stuck here.
Fact: John Crichton was here -- before he left Earth and ended up in the Uncharted Territories.
Fact: The one wormhole she knew of in this place was the one that was going to open up and suck an unsuspecting younger John Crichton into her world in less than a monen.
Aeryn chewed on her lower lip, digesting this.... After a few microts, she got up, padded across the room, and pulled her comm from its secure position in her pack. She contemplated it for a few more microts and then said briskly, "Pilot? D'Argo? Are you there?" Holding herself very still, she finally added, "John?"
Surprised at how very empty the silence made her feel, she put the badge away again and sat down on the bed, cross-legged, the television in front of her but not really registering.
All right, Aeryn, she told herself. You've been acting as if your unit was going to come on a retrieval mission at any moment. Face it. That's not likely to happen. So either you find a way to get out of here on your own, or you find a way to live in this place.
The way John had in the Uncharted Territories.
And that thought almost undid her again. Because seeing John tonight, seeing him in his world before *her* world had hardened him, hurt him, tortured him....the smile, the innocence, the curiosity, the gentleness.... All she could think of was the face of the man who was in such pain, he was taking drugs to keep her from his thoughts. Did she have any chance at all of winning his heart back?
Did he wonder where she was? Was he even trying to find her?
She inhaled sharply and thumped her hand down on the bed beside her, to distract her body from the tears that were threatening once again.
Anger flared then, this was John's fault. If he hadn't turned her world upside down.....
And just as quickly the anger died. It wasn't his fault, any more than it was hers, really. The whole frelling universe seemed to be against them. It wasn't fair, but that's the way it was.
Except that John was right. Fate kept trying to bring them together. Even here. She'd arrived when John Crichton was still on the planet, not after he was lost.
She sniffled once, and took a deep breath, and went to get something to drink. There was still beer, but she didn't want that. When she went into the bathroom to get some water, the machine that made coffee caught her eye. She'd noticed it earlier, but hadn't paid any attention to it. Now she remembered John more than once wishing for coffee when he had some reason to want to stay alert. The directions for using the machine were written out on a card and following them she unwrapped a packet of....something...and put it into a container with a drain hole in the center. Then she put water into another part of the appliance, and pushed the button. The bubbling, popping sound startled her, but the clear container began filling with something brown, and she decided it must be working correctly.
The stream was collecting in the container slowly, so she walked back out into the other room and stared at the television while she waited. She didn't bother turning the sound up any louder, just let her mind wander. The picture was all in shades of gray tonight, she noted idly.
Well, she thought, either she was going to find a way off this rock, or she was going to have to stay here.
Getting home was problematic. Best case scenario, someone would come after her, and they'd be able to get her back through whatever wormhole they came through in the first place. But no one knew she was here. Hezmana, D'Argo and the others might even think she went through that frelling wormhole on purpose....which wasn't likely to make them very happy about the prospect of leaping into one to find her.
If no one came for her....her prowler had a limited range, she wasn't likely to be able to get fuel here, and these people were unlikely to welcome her with open arms and help her modify the ship to use local fuels.
Without a wormhole, she was effectively trapped on this planet, even with her ship.
But, her mind circled back to the one thing she'd been thinking in the back of her mind since she realized *when* she was: there would be a wormhole in the vicinity of Earth when John carried out his Farscape experiment.
It would lead her to her past, but at least it would lead her to a world she understood.
A loud gurgling sound came from the bathroom, and she went to investigate. The clear container was now full of steaming brown liquid, and she poured some into a cup. She sipped carefully. It was bitter, but not so much as to be undrinkable, and it felt good on her tight throat, so she took it with her, back into the other room.
Sitting in the chair again with the warm cup in her hands, she considered other options.
She could stay here.
She'd told John, the one who died, that she would come here with him. And she would have. If he'd lived. She didn't think they would have stayed. However much John Crichton longed for Earth, it was somewhere he was from, not somewhere he could live any more, just like her and the Peacekeepers.
So far she'd been behaving as if she expected to leave. Stealing what she needed to get by, trying to stay isolated from the local population.
If she were going to stay, by choice or otherwise, that would have to change. She would have to find a way to blend in, earn her keep, find a place to live....in another part of the world, probably. Houston got considerably warmer at other times of the year, she'd ascertained today.
But what about the baby? The baby she fervently hoped was John's.... There were no surgeons here who knew anything about a Sebecean stasis pregnancy, though she'd been told the procedure to release the stasis was simple....
She took another sip of the hot beverage and took a step backwards in her thoughts. From the tour at IASA today, it was clear that spaceflight was anything but routine for humans. It was risky, and it was monitored very carefully. If she took her prowler up to follow John through his wormhole, she *would* be noticed on their scans. And odds were, John's mission would be aborted because of it.
And, unlike her own younger self, too competitive for her own good and unwilling to break off the chase of an escaping Leviathan, John would follow orders when the mission was stopped -- so there wouldn't be any wormhole for her to go through.
Unless she talked to him again, explained her predicament. Asked him to disregard orders, at least long enough for her to go through. Her prowler, if nothing else, would convince him she was telling the truth. If that time on the false Earth was anything to judge by, and she thought it was, he wouldn't turn her in. He'd help her....
Just then the low sound from the television caught her attention. She fumbled with the remote control and turned the volume up. Yes, she'd heard right. The human with no hair was saying "Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk," in just exactly the intonation John used when imitating something he called "The Three Stooges." She frowned at the images on the screen, trying to make sense of it. People were throwing projectiles at one another, and she wondered if it was a battle of some kind, and then, when one of the humans was hit and the projectile...squished...all over him, she remembered John describing something he called a "pie fight."
She shook her head and watched in horrified fascination for perhaps a quarter of an arn while all sorts of mayhem ensued, pushing, pulling, hitting, falling, crushing -- all for no apparent purpose, and without anyone actually getting hurt. It was ridiculous.
When an advertisement came on, the disembodied voice confirmed that these were the fictional characters John had talked about often, especially with D'Argo.
John *liked* this?
She would have to tell him that, like all of his species, he was insane.
And then she remembered that she didn't even know if John was alive in the place where she belonged, and reality came crashing back again.
She turned the television off and stared at its blank screen.
Slowly a question she'd been avoiding crept to the top of her mind.
What would happen if this John stayed here? If he didn't get sucked through a wormhole to the Uncharted Territories and have one hideous thing after another happen to him? Crais, the Ancients, wormholes, Scorpius, Scorpius' chip, madness, twinning, death....and her?
The more she thought about it, the more attractive the idea became -- keep him here, keep him safe. Keep him that happy, relaxed, enthusiastic man she'd met today. Spare him the pain. And perhaps even protect her world, because without John Crichton, no one they had met in their travels would even be close to the knowledge needed to use wormholes as a threat....
So, why had she been avoiding thinking about the possibility?
Because, she realized, she knew she could do it. He was attracted to her, not just physically, but emotionally too; she'd felt that link between them in the bar tonight. That bond. He'd listen to her. And he'd feel how much she loved him....and he would believe her, even if he didn't understand it....and he would stay. And he would love her.
She could make a life with him, John Crichton, here on his homeworld, even as she'd promised his later self that she would. This time he would be undamaged, unhurt by everything the frelling universe had thrown at them. He would be in his own world, and he'd be happy.
And some part of her wanted that desperately, thinking about how hard the last few monens had been on both of them.
But she knew she was lying to herself if she said that he hadn't had good times too, in the Uncharted Territories, seen wonders he'd wanted to see all his life, had happiness with her on Talyn, before he died. Might even be happy with her again, in the future. Two solar days ago, on Moya, before everything went pear-shaped, she'd still hoped they could work it out. Frell, she still hoped it now.
It wasn't her choice to make.
That was why she'd resisted even thinking it as a possibility.
Because what was she going to do? Ask *him*? Just telling him about what was going to happen would open a whole can of wormholes.....
And she knew to the depths of her soul that she couldn't trick him into staying here with her, or tell him half truths to get him to choose that option. The only way to have a relationship with him here, now, was to be totally honest with him. No lies, nothing to give him any reason not to trust her.
Would he let her risk her child's life on the chance they could find someone to release the fetus? Did *she* want to risk it?
She took a gulp of coffee, and nearly spit it out. It was cold now, and far less appetizing than it had been while it was hot. She took the cup back to the bathroom, poured the cold coffee down the drain, and then for good measure poured the brew remaining in the pot down the drain, too. She got a glass of water and took it back into the main room to try to think this through just a little further.
This *was* John's fault, she thought with a faint smile. If not for John Crichton, she'd never have even tried to deal with all these emotional questions. Even his dying, the crucible of grief and pain she'd gone through after the death of the man she'd given her heart to, had opened her heart and mind up that much more.
All right. One more time. Unless someone from her present came here through a wormhole, she was stuck on Earth. She could try to follow this John through his wormhole, leading to her past, but at least it was home -- although it gave her the queasy idea that there would be two of her, then.
Or she could try to make a life here, with or without John Crichton.
She'd never make it here without him, she knew it. Her heart absolutely refused to consider the possibility.
Well, that narrowed things down.
Either she used his wormhole to go back to familiar territory and make a life there without John, or she convinced him to stay here, with her.
But would the man she knew, the man who'd spent most of the last four cycles with her, want that? *Would* he want to bypass all the pain -- and also all the joy?
It was *not* her decision to make, the way she'd made a deal with Crais to save John and D'Argo three cycles ago, the way she'd made a deal with Scorpius to save her own frelling life, not that that appeared to have done her much good so far....
But the John who could tell her what to do wasn't here, and the John who was here, probably shouldn't be asked.
And then she thought, the one person who might understand, the one person who perhaps knew John well enough to advise her if he would want the option, was his father, Jack Crichton.
Her mind raced.
She'd intended to find Jack Crichton in the first place when she got here. After surviving two full days on this planet, she thought she just might be able to express herself well enough to ask him some questions without betraying the whole truth....
Perhaps after all someone could help her do the right thing for John.
She would go back to the area near the IASA compound in the afternoon, find Jack Crichton when he left work and follow him home, and talk to him.
The decision made, any energy Aeryn had left drained out of her, and she turned out the light, crawled into bed, and slept.
* * * * * * * *
There was a knock at the door of her motel room and, puzzled, Aeryn looked at it for a moment. It wasn't time for the maid, and anyway, the maid always announced herself. When the knock repeated, she picked up her pulse pistol and walked over to the door.
"Who is it?" she called quietly.
She could hear the rumbling sound of a throat being cleared outside her room.
"Um, it's John Crichton....could we talk?"
The sound of his voice made her stomach do flip-flops. Without any thought of the consequences, she reached into the bathroom and put the pulse pistol down on the counter, then pulled the door open.
They stared at each other for a moment in the morning light, and then John's eyes flicked lightly over her form, apparently approving of the pale pink T-shirt she was wearing along with the black leather pants.
His smile took her breath away.
How long had it been since the man in *her* world looked at her that way?
Struggling to control the situation, Aeryn bit her lip and then said briskly, "What do you want?"
He cocked his head sideways and smiled again, and said, "Can I come in?"
She dropped back and let him into the room.
John peered into the bathroom as he entered, and commented, "Nice pulse pistol. Can't hold a candle to Winona, though."
Thoroughly confused now, because the man who lived here now shouldn't have recognized the weapon, much less known the older John's pet name for his pulse pistol, Aeryn grabbed him by the arm and turned him around.
"Who are you?" she demanded, wondering if somehow this was her John, playing some kind of game, even though she knew in her heart it wasn't him.
"John Crichton," he told her, and reached his hand up and cupped her cheek.
Irrationally, she wished she hadn't braided her hair that morning, so that he could run his fingers through it. As it was, the touch of his fingers on her cheek nearly overwhelmed her, so she closed her eyes for a moment, and bit her lip again.
When she opened her eyes again, John was staring at her. What the frell was she doing? Why hadn't she pulled away from him? Thoroughly disconcerted, she took a step backwards.
"Who are *you*?" he asked. "I had to see you again."
"I told you. I'm Aeryn," she said. "And I think you need to go."
"Do I?" he asked, moving into her personal space again.
Frell this, she thought, and grabbed his hand, intending to show him she couldn't be toyed with.
But he countered her move with a perfect block, and then somehow she was in his arms, feeling his warmth, the strength of his body around her, and his lips were on hers and she gave up trying to figure out what was going on and surrendered to the kiss -- and awoke suddenly as her forehead hit the steering wheel of her unmoving car.
She looked around, disoriented, until she realized where she was. The car was parked on Jack Crichton's street, near his home.
Her heart was pounding, and she could almost feel John's lips on hers. This was the time for a string of inventive human curses, but she settled for a rather loud, "Frell!" She hadn't had a dream that vivid about John in monens....and why such a confused one?
Why not? She almost laughed.
She shook her head and settled her breathing, and took stock of her situation.
It had taken her three days to find Jack Crichton. Three incredibly frustrating days, during which she'd changed vehicles again and tried to stake out the main exits from the IASA facility one at a time without being conspicuous.
As time passed without making contact with John's father, she had grown more annoyed. Stupid frelling planet. She had never realized just how different John's planet-bound culture was from hers, and in some ways, it was terrifying.
And yet, Houston was full of trusting people who granted her small kindnesses as a matter of course: recommendations for food, help putting fuel in her vehicle -- her stolen vehicle, she thought ruefully -- what size clothing to buy, when she finally broke down and picked up two t-shirts so she had some shirts to rotate through, washing one out each night along with her underwear.... Jean the motel clerk had even made a suggestion of somewhere cheaper to stay, if she was going to be staying in the city for a while.
But the longer her forced stay here went on, the more she hoped that the comm in her backpack would chirp and she would hear Crichton's voice, or D'Argo's, or, frell, even Sikozu or the old woman, saying they were here and would she please get the frell aboard so they could leave...and she could leave the decision about changing John's future to John....
But, realistically, she needed to make the decision about whether to follow this younger Crichton to the Uncharted Territories, or try to make a life here, and that still meant following through and getting more intelligence from his father. So, she kept up the surveillance, and was finally rewarded by the sight of Jack Crichton driving down the road where she was parked, heading, she hoped, for home. She followed him carefully, because John had said he was a military man, and she thought he might be more alert than the average human.
But he didn't notice her following, and when after perhaps a quarter of an arn he stopped in front of what she assumed was his home, she noted the address and drove on, circling back a few minutes later and parking several houses away from his.
So, here she was. She'd obviously dozed off in the car, waiting to give him a chance to settle in for the evening. Frell. Being on this planet was making her lazy, or careless, or perhaps just exhausted, but she was definitely acting like a trainee on her first mission.
Enough.
Aeryn got out of the car and stretched, grabbed her pack off of the passenger's seat, and walked the few motras down the street and up to Jack Crichton's home.
There was a paved path from the street to the entrance of the dwelling, and she walked purposefully up to the front door. The neighborhood was clean and quiet and the homes looked in good repair. She'd driven around Houston enough for it to seem less alien to her than it might have, but she realized she had no idea how old the houses actually were. Had John ever lived here?
Now that she was here, she was nervous, not sure what she really wanted from John's father, or how he would react to her. She took a deep breath and reminded herself that all she was going to do was talk to one single human. She could do that. But her hand still shook slightly when she pressed the bell.
Jack answered the doorbell promptly. There was a light next to the door, and they had a clear view of each other, even though it was nearly full dark outside. The man John had wanted so much for her to meet stood in front of her.
Aeryn took in his appearance quickly. He looked exactly as she had seen him through the persona the Ancients created from John's memory. His short hair was gray, and he was dressed in a long-sleeved shirt, dark blue, with buttons down the front and a collar whose points were neatly buttoned down as well. His pants were light brown and loose-fitting. She didn't think she'd seen those exact clothes before, but they certainly matched her expectations. She couldn't help gaping.
For his part, Jack Crichton looked her up and down, taking in the pastel T-shirt, the leather pants, the way her hair was pulled back for the braid, the pack she was still carrying. Cholak only knew what he was making of her, but he looked curious. When she didn't say anything, he took the lead. "Yes? Can I help you?"
Embarrassed, she looked away to the side and then turned back to face him. "I'm sorry," she said. "I wanted to talk with you. About your son, John." Watching his face, she saw him retreat behind an almost physical barrier.
"All interviews need to be arranged through the IASA Public Relations Office," he said flatly, and started to close the door on her.
Without even thinking, Aeryn stepped forward into the doorway, putting her arm out to block the movement. Unless he tried a lot harder, the door was not going to close. "No," she said firmly. "I'm a friend. John's friend," she added, her voice softening on his name.
Jack took another look at her, assessing the taut muscles in her arm, the determination in her face, something he saw in her eyes, and the curiosity came back. He let go of the door and took a step backwards. "I think he would have mentioned a friend that looked like you," he said, but he gestured her into his home. "You must be cold," he added.
"No," she said, shaking her head, as she entered the room. "It's good outside." In fact, the temperature inside was warmer than she preferred, but it was well within her tolerance.
"Suit yourself," he said, leading the way into a comfortable room with several chairs and what she'd learned was called a sofa. He gestured towards the sofa, and when she sat down, putting her pack within easy reach at her feet, he settled in a chair opposite her.
Aeryn noted with a suppressed smile that he didn't trust her a bit, even though he'd let her in. He eyed her pack with speculation, but said nothing about it. And he didn't miss it when her eyes were drawn to a group of pictures on the wall, pictures of children that she thought might well include John. She longed to look at them more closely.
"Bass Lake," he said abruptly.
"Sorry?" she asked.
"Those pictures were taken on a family get away to Bass Lake. John ever mention it?"
Was that a trap? "No," she told him. "He didn't. Just a place called...." She struggled to remember a place he had talked about his father taking him fishing. It wasn't going to come, not all of it, anyway. "Something Mill."
That seemed to be good enough, and he relaxed just a little.
"Where did you say you know John from?" he asked.
"I didn't," she reminded him, and waited to see what he would say.
A small smile crinkled the corners of his mouth. "That's true," he said, nodding. And then he asked, "Where are you from....?" The way he trailed off invited her to identify herself as well as her origin.
Aeryn took the risk of saying, "It's better if you don't know," thinking that a military man would understand the concept of 'need to know.'
Apparently he was still giving her the benefit of the doubt, because he accepted that, but the set of his jaw suggested he wasn't going to put up with much more evasiveness.
Aeryn opened her mouth and asked abruptly, "Look. Do you think John could be happy confined to this planet?"
"Confined to this planet?" he repeated, uncomprehending. "Where else would he be?"
Chagrinned, Aeryn shook her head, trying to think of a better way to express herself. "If he didn't fly the Farscape mission, would he be okay?"
Jack's face turned suspicious again, with an edge of hardness underneath. "Is that a threat? You've obviously got some kind of military or paramilitary training....is someone out to sabotage John's project?"
Oh, that's wonderful, Aeryn, she thought, in another few microts he'll be calling IASA and turning the project upside down. She hurried to reassure him. "No, no threat! Not to the project, not to John! I would never hurt him." Not on purpose, anyway, she thought with a pang.
"Explain it to me," he growled.
"Space....flight...is dangerous here. If I ... ask him not to go? Would that be wrong?"
Jack's eye's narrowed. "You know, whoever you are, you sound like a stalker. I should call John and ask him if he knows you, and then I should call the Police." Alarmed, Aeryn started to interrupt, but he held up his hand. "But I'm not going to do that. I'm not sure why, but I'm not." He paused a moment, gathering his thoughts. "Look, I don't know what you think you're doing or what you think you need to do. But John, well, his whole life he's been an explorer. Always wanted to see what was around the next bend in the road. Take that away from him, he won't thank you for it. He might not even forgive you for it...."
"Even if there's a lot of bad with the good?" she asked, just a hint of moisture in her eyes.
"Hypothetically?"
Aeryn pulled herself together and agreed. "Of course. Hypo....hypothet....hypothetical."
Jack smiled then. "Close enough," he said. He leaned forward with his hands on his knees and continued. "John's like me and a whole lot of Crichton men. He'd rather die doing something he loves than be protected at home."
She nodded solemnly, knowing the truth of it. Before she could put the words together for an answer, the muffled sound of her comm badge came from her backpack. Her heart stopped at the sound.
Jack's gaze went from Aeryn to the pack and back again.
She ripped the pack open and pulled out the comms.
D'Argo's low voice rumbled from the speaker. "Aeryn? Are you there? Aeryn?"
"Yes, D'Argo, it's me," she said, relief in every word. "Where the frell have you been?" she added, slowly realizing that she'd been hoping to hear John's voice.
Before she could be too disappointed, another voice came through the comms. "Baby, are you all right?"
John. He was all right! And her breath caught, and her eyes filled with tears, because he hadn't called her that in....well, she wasn't sure how long. "Yes, I'm fine, now," she managed to get out past the tightness in her throat.
Jack was looking at her peculiarly, and she realized that he couldn't understand D'Argo -- and thinking about it, she had probably replied in Sebecean herself, not English. Did he recognize John's voice?
"Can you get to us?" John demanded, unknowingly giving his father another chance if he hadn't recognized it already.
"It will take about two arns to get to my prowler," she told him, wishing she didn't have to wait so long to see him again. "If it hasn't been discovered."
"Where are you, we'll come and give you a ride," John said immediately.
"At your.... at Jack Crichton's house," she told him.
There was dead silence all around after that one, nothing from the comms, nothing from Jack...
The reply, when it came, was from D'Argo. "Leave the channel open, we'll home in on it. We'll be there in 500 microts."
"In the street," John added, with a slight strain in his voice.
"Thank you," Aeryn told them gratefully. "I'll be waiting."
In the renewed silence, she and Jack stared at each other.
"I take it you don't need the answer to your hypothetical questions any more?" he asked finally.
"No....I don't," she breathed, relaxed for the first time since she'd found herself in orbit around Earth.
There was more silence while they waited.
After a bit Aeryn said, "Please, don't ask John about me."
Jack nodded his acceptance of her request.
When the low rumbling sound of D'Argo's Lo'La finally was heard, Aeryn smiled broadly.
"I take it that's your ride," Jack said, and she nodded.
Aeryn picked up her pack in one hand and headed for the door.
Jack followed her out to the street, looking in the direction of the sound, squinting to see....whatever there was to see.
But Lo'La was cloaked, and even in the glow of the streetlights, she couldn't be seen. To Aeryn's surprise, only one or two neighbors came out to see what the noise was. With a clank the doorway cracked open and the steps started down, revealing the interior of the ship.
Without a backward glance at Jack, Aeryn took off for the lowering steps at a brisk pace. When the opening was large enough, she saw John's relieved face looking at her, and she smiled her own relief.
As she walked, she saw John's gaze focus somewhere behind her. Still moving, she turned around and saw that he and Jack had locked eyes.
When she got to the foot of the steps, without actually taking his eyes off his father John reached down, grabbed her hand, and helped her up quickly. When she was standing at his side, she turned around and looked back at Jack.
He was looking at John with a very peculiar expression, a question, perhaps, on his face.
John smiled at him, an odd, quirky smile, and shook his head just barely perceptibly. Then he raised his right hand and gave his father a formal salute.
Jack stood up straighter and returned the salute. Then, he backed away, towards his home.
John and Aeryn turned and walked inside the ship, John triggering the closure of the door.
As the ship took off in a burst of noise, Aeryn impulsively threw her arms around John and hugged him tight, not caring if he wanted her to or not. To her surprise, he hugged her back, and laid his cheek on top of her head.
"Welcome back," he whispered.
* * * * * * * *
When Aeryn jumped down from her prowler to the floor of Moya's docking bay, Chiana's exuberant tackle nearly knocked her over, and Aeryn did drop her pack. As the two of them teetered dangerously, Chiana exclaimed, "I told you it was a bad idea to go out there!"
Aeryn laughed and hugged her and said, "It's good to see you, too, Chiana."
The younger woman stood back and examined Aeryn critically. "You've been shopping. And you didn't take me? You could have done *so* much better!"
A grin still on her face, Aeryn shrugged and said unrepentantly, "Sorry."
The whirring sound of Rygel's throne sled intruded, and both women looked up. "Of all the fahrbot things, Aeryn...." the Hynerian began.
Tired already of the I-told-you-so's, especially since D'Argo and Pilot had already given her theirs, Aeryn opened her mouth to object. But Rygel smoothly continued, "But we seem to have collected both you *and* Crichton at last. Let this be a lesson to you both!"
Rygel, you have no idea, Aeryn thought. But she was so relieved to be back in her world, among friends, that she contented herself with saying, "Oh, and nothing ever happens to frell up your plans!"
Chiana piped up, "Crichton was really upset with us for losing you when we got him back and he found out you weren't here."
Before Aeryn could respond to that bit of news, D'Argo piloted Lo'La into the landing bay. Chiana, Aeryn and Rygel all paused to watch him land the ancient ship not too far from Aeryn's prowler. John came down the steps first, followed by D'Argo's large form.
Aeryn watched nervously as the two men came over and joined the group. Since that embrace when they'd lifted off of Earth, she and John hadn't had too much to say to each other. John had been focused on getting away from his homeworld as quickly as possible to avoid something he called an Unrealized Reality, which, he said, would screw a very big pooch.... She didn't think she wanted to know what that meant. Now, they were all safely back in Tormented Space.
Would he talk to her?
Would he let her talk?
The wall that had been between them for monens seemed weaker -- He'd called her "Baby"! -- but....
"You guys are the draddest," Chiana said, when D'Argo and Crichton arrived. "You found her!"
The two men preened and slapped each other's hands in mid-air.
"I think I deserve some credit for surviving five whole days on such a primitive planet *waiting* for them," Aeryn teased. "It took them long enough."
"Well, ex-cuuuuuse me," Crichton said melodramatically. "There was a little matter of trying about two dozen wormhole exits till we picked up your comms!"
His tone was humorous, but Aeryn got a sense of the terror he'd lived with, searching for her, and it seemed the others picked it up, too. D'Argo sighed and said, "Well, we're all back safe! I'm going to go unpack." He started towards the exit.
Aeryn glanced at John, and saw that he was looking at her again. She risked a small smile, and he smiled back.
D'Argo had only gotten a few paces when he turned around and glared at Chiana. "Well? Aren't you going to help me?"
"Huh?" she said, and then realized his intent. "Oh, oh, yeah, I'll be glad to help." She turned and thwacked Rygel on the back of the head. "Come on, Ryge, we could use your help too!"
"I don't do menial -- Oh, oh, yes, of course. I'm coming, I'm coming," Rygel agreed rapidly, and followed D'Argo and Chiana out of the docking bay.
Left alone in the bay, Crichton and Aeryn stood perhaps a motra apart, looking at each other, unsure what to say.
Finally, John broke the silence. "The pink," he said, waving his hand at her shirt. "It's nice. I like it."
Irrationally pleased at the compliment, Aeryn rubbed the back of her neck and then said, "I'm glad." She looked down and tugged at the shirt where it was tucked into the waistband of her pants, and added, "Me too, actually. I don't think I've *ever* worn this color before."
"Gee, send a girl to Earth and look what happens," he said with a grin that faded quickly. He brought his hand up and rubbed his thumb over his chin, thinking.
Aeryn looked down at the floor, wondering what to say, what he wanted. She knew what she wanted: she wanted to talk. She wanted to tell him she loved him, that she didn't think she could live without him in her life, that this was killing her --
"Come on," he said, gesturing with his head towards some crates a few motras away. "Can we talk?"
She let her breath out in a huge sigh. "You read my mind," she told him, and walked straight over and sat down.
John followed her, and sat down on the adjacent crate, close enough that she could feel the warmth of his body next to hers. Their thighs were only denches apart. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath and took comfort in his presence. Whatever he wanted to talk about, she could, she would, handle. She looked at him then and smiled encouragingly.
He looked off into the depths of the docking bay for a moment and then turned back. "Aeryn," he said, careful not to make it an accusation, "What were you doing talking to my dad?"
She smiled at him wanly. "I wondered," she said, "if it would be right to try to keep you from going through the wormhole." She cocked her head sideways and scrunched up her face. "To protect you." John was staring at her, but so far he hadn't said anything, so she continued. "I knew it wasn't my decision to make, and you weren't there, and I thought..." She paused and scratched her ear. "I thought your father might, you know, know what you would want."
"You're kidding, right? You told my *dad* about the wormhole? What was going to happen?" His voice had risen slightly, though he seemed to be trying to keep from leaping to conclusions.
"No!" she said vehemently. "I never mentioned wormholes! Or you disappearing! I was careful!"
John sighed. "Well, I guess between us we didn't freak him out too badly, or we wouldn't be here, things would be all different...."
"What do you mean?"
John sighed again. "Baby," he said, and her heart skipped a beat just as it had in his father's house, "you can't go changing the past. It'll screw up the present. Instead of Steven Spielberg, you get Stephen King."
"What?" she asked, feeling for once she needed to have one of his cryptic sayings explained.
He reached out and took her hand. "Remember what we did to the nurses at the peace memorial? How we got them all killed when they didn't die before?"
Aeryn nodded, not following where he was going.
"Well, if I wasn't there, say, when Moya was escaping -- what if Moya had gotten recaptured by the Peacekeepers? Or instead of getting away from Crais that first day, what if Moya had been destroyed? What would have happened to Zhaan, D'Argo, Ryge....? You? What would have happened to Pip if we weren't there to rescue her?"
She blinked, going cold. "I could have changed all that? I didn't think...." She'd thought about John, and wormholes -- she'd even thought about herself, but it had never occurred to her that the effects would ripple outward.
She shivered, and John reached out and put his arm around her shoulders, pulling her close. She closed her eyes and leaned her head against him. "You never told me they could take you to a different time!" she whispered. "I didn't know what to do!" Tears filled her eyes and he held her tighter.
"I know. I know Aeryn." He turned his head and kissed the top of her head gently. "No one knows what to do when they fall down the rabbit hole."
Aeryn sniffed, and said softly, "I guess you know about that."
After a little bit, John asked curiously, "Why would you want to do that? Stop me from coming here?"
She was tempted not to tell him, but not telling him things was part of what had gotten them to this sorry state, and so she told him the truth. "I saw you," she said. "And DK. On the television." She sat up and actually looked him in the eye. "You were so happy...."
He snorted. "I was terrified that we were going to screw up in a big way, very publicly, and we were going to be laughed out of the space program. And then no reputable university would take either one of us back!"
Aeryn shook her head. "Maybe. But you were happy." She took a deep breath. "I talked to you."
John frowned, thinking. "You did what?"
She straightened up and told him, "I followed you from IASA, to a bar. We talked, a little. And you should have seen your face." Her eyes teared up and she didn't bother to blink them away. She reached her hand up and touched his cheek gently. "You looked just like I remember you when we first met. Innocent. Happy. And all I could think was how much you've been hurt...." She trailed off when she saw that he wasn't quite listening. "John?"
He snared her hand in his. "Did you tell me you were a pilot?"
She nodded, and then said, "And you asked for my phone number."
John threw his head back and gasped, "Oh my God! Aeryn! That was you!"
She looked at him, shocked. "What? You never said you remembered me before! Did I do something? Change something?"
He took a deep breath and shook his head. "No, I don't think so. I mean, I suppose I'd think I'd always remembered even if I hadn't, but.... one night not too long before we launched, I was meeting DK after work to have a couple beers. We'd had a bitch of a day....and there was this girl....this foreign girl with long dark hair...." He squinted at her, trying to square the memory. "And we really clicked, at least I thought we did...." He stared at her again. "That was *you*?"
Unsure what to say, she simply nodded and waited.
And he threw his head back again and this time he laughed. John actually laughed.
When she looked at him in bewilderment, he said, "When I first got here, and everything was so strange, when I was really homesick, I used to wonder what happened to that girl. I used to wonder if she remembered me." He laughed again and shook his head.
"She remembers you," Aeryn whispered.
John shook his head again, and then sobered. "Look, Aeryn, I've had a lot of time to think lately...about how I was feeling, how I was acting. And you know something I realized? Dren happens. The universe is out to get us, and we get pulled into stuff that's not our fault, and then we have to deal with it...."
She held her breath, sensing that this was what he'd wanted to talk about, and that it was important.
"When you left Moya, you didn't go looking for trouble, did you?" he asked.
It was more of a statement than a question, but she answered it anyway. "No."
"Trouble found you, and you did what you had to do. And that includes not bein' able to tell me what you got mixed up in. You did what you had to do," he repeated.
She nodded, reminding herself to breathe.
"Just like I just told Einstein I'd take care of the whole frellin' universe," he said. "And you know what, Baby? It's okay. It's okay."
She looked at him, throat tight, tears brimming, and asked, "Why? Why now?"
And this time, the tears were in John's eyes. "Because when I thought I'd lost you again....with us so frelled....God, Aeryn, that hurt *way* more than my own hurt pride or whatever it was...." He shook his head. "I love you, Aeryn, and I need you, and right now I don't give a crap about anything else."
"I love you too," she whispered. "Beyond hope."
The expression on his face touched her so deeply that she gave up trying to keep control of her emotions. She wrapped her arms around him as if she would never let him go, and cried. She could feel his own tears on her face as he held her close and rocked her. When John unwrapped one arm from around her to swipe the back of his hand across his face, Aeryn pulled back just enough to be able to look into his eyes, pretending his face wasn't as wet as hers. She understood the fear she saw there, recognized it from herself, only a few cycles past, knew it would take time to replace that fear with trust....
But John had enough trust to lean his face towards hers, and she arched her head up slowly, reaching her mouth for his. And when their lips met she knew she was home. This was where she belonged, in John Crichton's arms. Their kiss, the first since she'd broken his heart by leaving Moya, was warm, and gentle, and loving. Neither one of them, it seemed, was ready for more, but this kiss was a pledge for the future, binding them together truly, promising that no matter what happened, they would face it together, work it out together.
When at last they separated, sat back and looked in each other's eyes, they were both smiling.
John brought his fingers up to his mouth, ran the tips gently over his lips.
Aeryn reached her hand out and caressed his cheek. "Are we okay?" she asked.
"A lot more okay than we were," John said, tilting his head into her hand.
Aeryn took a deep breath then, and said, eyes twinkling, "Good. Because I have to tell you, I saw the 'Three Stooges' on television on Earth."
"And?" he said cautiously.
"And, you are frelling fahrbot, John Crichton!"
John laughed again. "It's a guy thing, Babe. D'Argo would have loved it!"
Aeryn shook her head. "Yes, I believe he would." And then she remembered something else. "Wait right here!" she said, getting up.
John watched, mystified, as she walked over to where she'd dropped her pack when Chiana ambushed her. She rifled through it and returned holding the three Hershey bars, including the one she'd started but never finished, behind her back.
He must have gotten a glimpse of them, because he was up and trying to see around behind her before she could offer them to him. "Are those what I think they are?" he asked eagerly.
"I don't know," she teased, "what do you think they are?"
"Please, Aeryn, tell me they're chocolate!"
"Why would I tell you something like that?" she asked, dancing away from him, her eyes sparkling. "Maybe it's prano, from that last commerce planet we were on."
He looked at the expression on her face, and grinned. "Not buyin' it, Babe." A quick feint to her left, a dash to the right instead, and he almost had them.
Aeryn laughed and gave in and handed the chocolate bars over. He held them in his hands, and looked at her. And in his eyes she saw the echo of his younger self, happy, curious, eager to see what was around the next corner. Just an echo, but enough to tell her that if she helped him sort things out, if they saw what was around the next corner together, there might be happiness, for both of them.
He noticed the partially-eaten bar then and asked, "Didn't you like it?"
"I was waiting for you," she told him, remembering how upset she'd been.
He must have seen enough in her eyes to guess what had happened, because he set the two unopened bars down, and took the other one and broke two pieces off. "Here," he said softly, "Open up!" and he put one chunk in her mouth. She took the other piece from his hand, and he opened his mouth, waiting. She popped it into his mouth, savoring the flavor of the creamy, sweet candy herself, and watched his face.
There were parts of this man that she would never understand, like 'The Three Stooges,' or wormholes. But there were other parts, like chocolate, and being just one half of a whole, that she understood completely. She vowed that they would never be separated again, if she had anything to say about it.
And then she grinned and popped another piece of chocolate in his mouth.
