"There was a man bespake a thing,
Which when the owner home did bring,
He that made it did refuse it:
And he that brought it would not use it,
And he that hath it doth not know
Whether he hath it yea or no."
- Sir John Davies, Riddle upon a Coffin
THEY HAD TRANSITIONED OUT ONTO AN EARTH that seemed covered in dust.
A world of empty intact buildings, of streets with vehicles that had simply stopped, a city just empty of humanity, where that humanity had seemingly abruptly … disappeared. No birds. Every plant they could see dead. The sky was an odd black-blue, what clouds they could see wispy and thin. The air was flinty with the smell of metal, the smell of wet earth in the air, though the place seemed to not have had rain for a long while.
"Empty," Iain observed, drawing a finger through the dust on a nearby vehicle. "It's all just empty." It seemed like early morning, the sky still dark, though there were no stars. A breeze blew by, though it barely stirred the dull brown dust.
"No beaches or taverns yet," Aeryn sighed, "I can't imagine what's happened here."
"How long till we leave?" Iain was looking at the buildings with their dark windows, mute interiors. The world around him looked too empty - it felt empty. Empty with a capital 'E', as if its doom had come and gone already and this was just the silence left behind. Even the air felt listless, finished and done with itself.
Aeryn checked and then cursed.
"I can't tell!" She held it up. "It just keeps saying 'null'."
"Right." He coughed. "That can't be good." Iain swore he smelled smoke just then but couldn't be sure. "Do you smell smoke?"
"I just smell dust." Aeryn inhaled and then sneezed. "Too much dust."
"It's not dust," a voice interjected then, tired, gravelly and familiar, "it's rust."
They turned and casually strolling toward them - Crichton, one very similar to the pirate, with a missing eye - this one still patched - his longcoat - a light grey - sleeveless and unlike the one she knew, his entire right arm was cybernetic. He had a dark kerchief tied around his head and goggles around his neck. A breathing mask was over his mouth, making his voice sound mechanical. He had his hands in his pockets and he, like everything else was covered with a thin coating of the rust, as he called it. He stopped a metre from them and regarded them, seemingly unsurprised or perturbed by their appearances.
"Rust," he continued, "from an energy wave that stripped all the iron molecules from everything it encountered and blew them all over." He shrugged and withdrew a hand from his pocket to toss two masks at their feet. "Rust is bad for the lungs."
Aeryn bent and retrieved them, passing one to Iain. A quick inspection saw them in working order and both pulled them on.
"Aeryn, right? Just different enough," he said at last, "and a Me. You look steady, Me."
"You're not surprised to see us?" Iain asked. This Crichton's eye didn't seem to quite focus on his surroundings, he noted, the man appeared as if he were looking at something just behind them, just a moment earlier.
"No, not at all. Why would I be? There's nothing in it to be suspicious of - can't make matters worse than they are." He looked at Aeryn. "Where were you going? It can't have been to anywhere here."
"Trying to get home," she said simply, disturbed by the look in his eye when it fell on her, for she saw a kind of …longing in there, memories of things between them, latent rage and banked fires. Something vibrated in there behind all that seeming calmness.
"Makes sense," he said after pondering it. His gaze turned to Iain. "And you?"
"The same, I guess."
"You hers?" Crichton's voice seemed to waver when he asked.
"Uh…" Iain began but Crichton cut him off with a half-smile.
"Yeah. Just not yet. Hmm. Can see it. You want it, but it's not yet. She's like that. Always on the damn cusp, then back, then in, then out, then on and on." He abruptly turned. "Well, come on, then," and began to walk back the way he came. Aeryn and Iain exchanged looks and hesitated.
"Would have done it already," his voice came back as he did not slow. They followed after a moment.
"Uhm…" Aeryn began, "what happened here?"
She jogged a little to catch up to him. Iain lagged behind, just in case.
"Huh? This? Oh, I did this." Crichton swirled a finger around to indicate everything. "I was experimenting. They asked me - begged me to give them super-fast space travel and weapons. Gimme-gimme - never ends. Wormholes and all that." He winked and Aeryn frowned at his voice. His cadences seemed …off, his voice strangely out of sync somehow. "I opened one in orbit." He pointed up without looking. They glanced up and saw a small silver vortex churning up there. "That one." He huffed behind the mask. "Too close, I guess. It's sucked the Earth through it." He threw up his hands as if exasperated. "Right. Fucking. Through. It." He pulled his mask up to spit into the dust. "Who knew? Right? Nobody warned me!"
"All the people… ?"
"Yeah… gone. Dunno how." He raised his hands and crossed them sharply. "Might have been that wave - or that liquefaction thing I warned them about. Phwit! - gone. Like they were never here." A sidelong glance. "Is my face red or what?"
They came out of the street into what had appeared to have once been a large parkland. Laying on its side in the middle was a Vigilante - the Vengeance or something very similar. It looked for all the world like a long black creature laying on its side, asleep. Crichton strolled toward it.
"Far as I know, I killed every one of 'em. Eight and a half billion people. Dead. Kaput. Deady-dead-dead. Dead as a can of spam. I hate people so much. being so many, then dying." He slowed as he neared the Vigilante, sat on a large concrete block near it. "Who knew the damn thing could transport a whole friggin' planet?"
"We're not in the solar system?" Iain asked.
"We're in a solar system." Crichton answered. "The ship said something like two hundred and twenty two light-years in a straight line toward Galactic Centre. I think we're in the equivalent Oort Cloud of Phi Aquarii, in the constellation of Aquarius." He sniffed. "One point zero five degrees south of the ecliptic." He glanced up. "Not good for Earth. It's a spectroscopic binary system with a red giant. We're far enough out not to get fried, but Earth's pretty well and truly fucked as planets go. Even without people." He looked around and huffed. Dust flew off him and then settled back. "Yeah, I did a number on her all right."
Aeryn sat opposite him, with Iain standing behind her.
"You're surprisingly calm, considering… everything."
"What?" Crichton cocked his head at her. "I should be more traumatized? Wailing and cursing myself?" A short nod. "I did that kinda thing, at first - I got angry, I got sad because of my mistakes. Except, y'know, that trauma is something we do to ourselves, it's a rail against simple facts and things we want to change but can't. All you have to do is accept it. It's all you can do. Our trauma reoccurs because we refuse to accept the truth of reality - this happened and cannot be undone. Are you stronger than that moment, or is the moment stronger than you?"
"Just move on?" Iain enquired, seeing some wisdom in it.
The look is stern though not unkind.
"What else is there? I said over and over again that wormholes were bad news. They pushed and needled and cajoled and blackmailed me." Crichton stated. "I told them. So, yeah, I refuse to feel much. You want me crawlin', wallowing in despair and dissolution? What do those accomplish? Let pain - self-inflicted pain, rule your life?" He gestured to the dusty remains of everything. "Here's where it leads. I learned it too late, but it's reality - the truth is the truth." A flat smile, a sincere tone, "Thank you for being here to hear it."
Crichton put his head down and breathed. When he looked up, he looked squarely at Aeryn.
"So, I have no remorse, now. There's no point. It's like guilt. I'm beyond that."
He gestured to a series of slabs behind him.
"This. You. Them. That's you, over there," he pointed to one. "Next to you, Chi and next to her D." He stood up and walked to each in turn. "Here's Shiv and Miriya and Stark and Rygel and Koiban and me." He nodded at the hole before him. "Not in it yet, though." He kicked rusty earth into it. "Rusty death. Rushing rustily to nowhere."
"He's completely mad," Iain muttered behind her. Aeryn wasn't so sure.
"I think he's gone past that," she murmured back.
"There's this asininely selfish idea that no one can understand your pain or heartache." Crichton shook his head and kicked more dirt into his hole. "What a load of shit! Of course they can! That's just you not bothering to face it inside yourself for yourself. Of course no one can understand it, simply because you can't be bothered understanding it yourself!"
He came back and halted before Aeryn, looking over her head at Iain.
"Would you mind wandering away for a minute or five?" He gestured as if to indicate the way to go. "This is a me and her thing." He put his right hand up as if to pledge. "I swear no harm will come to her - y'know, any more than already has, to be pedantic."
He turned his gaze to Aeryn, who regarded him then looked back at Iain.
"I'll be all right."
He hesitated, nodded and then stalked off. He didn't go far though.
"He suits you." Crichton said, kneeling in front of her, putting a hand on each of her knees as if to balance himself. "You already have him crazy about you - I can see it. He can't. You suspect it, but you always do." A ghost of a smile. "Aeryn Sun, you've consumed me and I've dragged you to ruin. Too many times. I can see it in your eyes."
"No, I don't think that's true." Aeryn felt compelled to say it, yet the flashes of the Ancient showing her endless destroyed universes, endless raging Crichtons swarmed through her mind. "I keep coming back," she tried, as if it might console him, somehow.
"It is true, you know it." He rose and took her hand. She rose with him. "That's you, back there. That's the price. That's the only thing I wept over." He stepped closer. "Always to ruin, Aeryn Sun." She thought for a moment that he was about to move to kiss her, though he just gathered her close and hugged her firmly yet gently.
She didn't resist, nor did she hug him back.
"Yet here you are." He said softly. "There you'll go. I never deserved you. I couldn't. I never loved you in a worthy way. You deserved worship and all I ever saw was the stars."
He stepped back and gave her another stern glare, his mood and demeanour abruptly changing.
"Why are you here?"
"We're… lost, in a way, outside our own universes." She shrugged. "I know it sounds strange…"
"No, not at all." Crichton waved at the sky. "If I can do that, you certainly can jump universes. Of course you can. Why couldn't you? One leap, one turn, one hell, one chaos-borne lost girl striving." He chuckled to himself. He tried to run a few steps and skid in the rusty dust, failed and almost fell.
"We're transitioning," Iain had returned, "but there's no signal here. No energy we can use."
Aeryn showed Crichton the scanner. It was still showing the 'null' on its screen.
"Ah." Crichton looked up and studied Iain for a few heartbeats. "Have you killed before?'
"Uh…" Iain glanced at Aeryn, said, "I was a soldier…"
"Yep." Crichton nodded sagely and waved a finger. "You'll kill again. More." He reached over and patted Iain on the shoulder. "Inevitability is the midwife of failure."
Again the abrupt change in mood as he snap-turned to Aeryn and pointed at her scanner.
"Earth's soaked in wormhole energy," Crichton informed her, "your scanner's just overwhelmed by it all. Wouldn't anyone be? I certainly was." He nodded to himself with a small shrug, just a twitch of his shoulders. "Just get off the planet. It's spiralling into Aquarii and that red giant's just gonna fry it."
"Unless you have another ship, we're all as screwed as Earth," Iain said testily, disquieted by it all.
Crichton reached into his pocket and handed Aeryn a control rod.
"Here. She's not dead, just sleeping." He told her. "The Vindicator is also infused with wormhole energy. Her engines are fueled by it. I made sure of that. Big, crystal-occulting drivers that just suck it straight out of the background vacuum. Just there. It's safe, I promise." He waggled a finger in the general direction of the ship. "She can go anywhere." He patted her hand. "Take it, she always knows the way home."
"What - are you sure?"
"You could walk," he glared at Iain, "got anything to say now?"
"No," Iain took a step back, "sorry."
"Never be sorry," Crichton thrust his hands in his pockets, turned to look at the wormhole in the sky. It was smaller now. The ground rumbled softly under their feet. Somewhere in the distance a large building crashed down in a billow of dust. The horizon had a thin band of intense red light on it. "Take your guilt and use it like currency. Fate is a whore without scruples." He began to walk away, the rusty dust swirling around his boots. "If you don't love her yet, you should."
"Aeryn," he called back, his words fading as the distance grew, "this is all I know: I love thee freely, as men strive for right/I love thee purely, as they turn from praise/I love thee with the passion put to use/In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith/I love thee with a love I seemed to lose/With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath/Smiles, tears, of all my life, if Fate will choose..."
He vanished into a swirl of red kicked up by an errant breeze, and Aeryn felt a single hot tear roll from her eye as he did. There was no emotion behind it she could identify. It was as if he just deserved it, at least one. She swiped it off her face, leaving a red smear in her cheek.
"…I shall but love thee better after death," Iain finished. "We should leave," he added gently. Aeryn nodded, turned to the ship and activated the control rod. For too long a moment, it seemed as if Crichton had lied, the ship powerless, until the earth around it growled and cracked and the ship righted itself, rose with rolling dust and crumbling ground. It extended its landing gear and settled down.
"The Vindicator," Aeryn eyed it, the Vigilante much like the one she knew, though this one had a large structure that appeared to pierce through it, down by the engines, and Aeryn surmised it was the wormhole energy generator he'd mentioned.
"I want to pity him," Iain said as they made their way to the ship, "but I don't think I should."
Aeryn slowed to look back to where Crichton had vanished. He'd been gone long since, she knew.
"No," she murmured, "I don't think so, either."
INSIDE THE VINDICATOR, all appeared as she remembered with minor differences and Aeryn did not hesitate. They were soon off the Earth and away. Behind them the planet began to darken. In the distance, they saw the wormhole blink out.
"The scanner's working perfectly now," she told her companion as she set it on an interface near the Pilot's controls. She reached into her hair and unwound the PHATE from it, likewise setting it down on an interface. "We should transition at any time."
"For the record," Iain tried to get comfortable in the co-pilot's seat. His head hurt, a headache caused by the sudden surcease of stress. "I know nothing about wormholes past the basics. Not a single equation that leads to any of that."
He bent his head at the system they were rapidly leaving behind.
"Good," Aeryn said emphatically, "leave it that way."
The ship juddered suddenly and they felt the all-too-familiar patter as the transition began.
"The first thing we do when we get back," he said as the universe began to wink out, "is find that damn tavern!"
"Agreed!"
Everything faded out.