Aetiology
1. Acceptance
You fall back into place like clockwork: attending rounds, staff meetings, family dinners. Not a step amiss. It isn't the same, some of the grime sticks. You wonder how you thought they could ever be deceived. They are watching you now.
This morning you saved a father of three.
The wife won't stop clasping your hands and bowing over them. Your precious surgeon's hands. Pulling back firmly but kindly, you say that you were only doing your job.
Five more hours you'll wait and see. You may still lose him.
Up and down the post-op ward, patients negotiate with enduring sleep. Bone china plates holding tiny candles by their bedsides. Makeshift altars. Visitors purchase them at the hospital store.
Laotian-ye bao you. Merciful Buddha, protect my sister, River.
It catches you by surprise. Religion was a fact, never a habit; your whispered prayers are clumsy even to your unversed ears. But you have seen miracles aplenty in your profession. The dealer held no scalpel.
Memory of the laser burn stabs the back of your neck. Cold envelops your wrists. For a second your eyes water, your hands go weak.
They taught you precision and control at the Medacad, leaving fate a lesson to be grappled with alone.
On the route home, you will buy the sweetest incense and flowers. Such offerings please the deities. Also perfumed water to show your heart is pure.
The Tams are practical people.
2. Feng
"Were you followed?"
"What? No." Garcia shakes rain from his overcoat as the doors close with a hiss. Doing a bad job of keeping nerves under wraps. "I don't think so."
Useless. Here on the Central Planets, you have to make do with low-grade amateurs. The professionals are too connected, surviving through symbiosis with the Alliance. Garcia's type does not last long.
"I got your itinerary and uniform. The key-codes will take a while longer, but you'll get it." His hands leave the handle of the satchel in his lap. You make no move to take it.
Deliberately, you look at the window as the bus restarts; neon-cast rivulets sprint painterly across chitoglass. Reflections of evening commuters tapping on their cortex tablets.
What you know about reading people you learned from River. Don't look at them, see around them. The empty spaces, the unspoken words.
Your dread turns into something dense and cold.
When in your pocket you touch thumb to blade-edge – like stone, you do not bleed.
"Garcia, my friend. I think you're going to have to live with the disappointment of not receiving payment today."
Engines' roar grows out of nowhere. A steely navy and white Federal hovercraft, lights and siren blazing. By the sound, another is flanking the other side of the bus.
Finally you turn away, you have seen enough. The loudspeaker voice speaks: three syllables in a way stripped of meaning. You hardly recognise the name they produce.
Passengers milling in confusion.
Grab the sleeve of Garcia's coat, choosing a spot where he will bleed out fastest –-
"Simon, wait —"
-- you drive in the knife.
3. Londinum
Four years it has taken to worm your way here. This lab. This regimental facility. You wear the Alliance insignia on your clothing with perfect legitimacy every day.
It wasn't easy, but you did it.
It meant publicly accepting the story about the fatal fall, the unrecoverable body. Meant committing all those coded letters to memory and stashing randomly the ones you didn't burn, in case your apartments were searched; and you know they have been at least once.
Whatever it took.
That makes you a better deceiver than anyone supposed. You think it is worth living a lie to uncover the truth.
When you identify yourself to the computer, biometrics immediately clears your access.
And this is it. All the gruesome successes of the project scrupulously monitored and kept on database. But when you search for the subject line "Tam, River"…
No.
It is not possible. It cannot be only in your head that she exists.
Yet a part of you has always known it might come to this. Legitimacy creates its own censorship, its own conspiracies; some truths can only be witnessed from the outside.
The morning of the day after, you dress meticulously as ever. Fixing each pearly button, smoothing non-existent wrinkles with a sense of finality. Soon you'll be replacing them with more suitable garments.
You have gone as far as you can as Simon Tam.
In your bed, Ingrid still sleeps. A doctor herself as well as a surgeon's wife, she knows the hours that you keep. Like every other day, you set the coffee brewing for when she eventually wakes. Disconnect the ache to touch her skin.
Do not dwell on her. It means nothing in the end.
The grave, handsome face staring back from the mirror you have already begun to erase in your mind. The line of the jaw is problematic. You will grow a beard; and with a broken nose, badly-set, you will be unrecognisable.
Whatever it takes.
So do not be frightened. Leaving is not as difficult as remaining forever in the dark.
4. Chimera
There is a girl, glowing, at the centre of all that is discernible.
Names are just labels. Now aeons behind you; but somehow you are aware of her. She is important to you.
River. She calls herself River.
Your River is thinking, seeing, feeling – so many things. It is confusing and painful. Like being stretched over all times and places at once. Her shining little body straining to contain it all. Indiscriminate.
She is your anchor; and she is full of secrets.
Whether by purpose or chance, her path crosses that of a ship.
There has been a ship. There is or there will be a ship. It too is important. Because your River knows this, so then, do you.
"A mighty big crate you have here, Miss."
"That's my business, Captain Reynolds. It's all perfectly legal."
"Ain't ever crossed my mind it being otherwise. Still… Mind if I inquire s'to what manner of object you be transportin'?"
Not what – whom. River thinks of a name, but it slips by you. Cannot be caught. Dimly you know that this is not the first time; and yet you are untroubled. Hers is the only name you need.
Her brother, then.
She is taking her brother to the rim. Beyond the arms and eyes of the powers that be. It is what he would have wanted, to be buried at the edge of the wilderness.
The ship's captain was a good man; he will be good again. His mind has a steadiness that brings River peace.
You think… You think this makes you content.
"You know the saying, Mal. 'When the body sinks into death, the essence of man is revealed.' Simon looked into me — and I will never leave him."
The End
October 7, 2005