Disclaimers: Galen, Gideon, Sarah, Dureena, Max and Matheson aren't mine. Neither is the Excalibur. They were all invented by a genius, J. Michael Straczynski, who I would give my right arm to meet. Segment titles come from an Irish folk song called The Fields of Athenry, written in the 1850s about the potato famine. Eilerson quotes Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Galen quotes The Taming of the Shrew, by William Shakespeare.
Author's Note: Thanks to Tara for the beta, and for keeping track of where and when Galen went, all these years.
by a lonely prison wall
The second year, he started to watch for rituals. For signs that they were going mad.
Dureena paced, walking around and around the hallways, stalking the bridge and the engine room and the observation deck like an obsessed banshee, her anger coursing through her every step. Her eyes on the windows, as if the cure was a road sign, as if she'd miss it passing by if she didn't keep looking.
Eilerson read Chaucer. Sometimes he read it to Matheson in the mess, and the look on John's face as he listened to those magnificent words could have lit the ship for light years. Matheson worked double shifts, paranoid that something would happen on the bridge while he slept, and sat hunched over his coffee, laughing and laughing at the Miller's Tale.
Gideon watched Sarah, especially, Sarah and her staff. Sarah started drinking tea instead of coffee. Sarah confessed to nightmares. Cranes pulling vast loads of bodies into massive graves, while she tried to push them back out with her hands. She began to wash her hands more often than she needed to, began to give herself manicures. Worried over every papercut.
Once, he went into Medlab and she was just sitting at her desk, looking at her hands. Opening and closing them like a newborn does. She started and busied herself when she saw him, and though he said nothing, he knew how she felt.
Two hands, and the entire universe, and no weapons strong or fast enough to blast the answers out of nothingness. No magic great enough to drive the fear away.
His box murmured to him at night. He didn't know when, but he'd started to tune it out.
His own dreams were of drifting, lost, in a ship without anchors, tethers, guides. Of the six of them (five now, he reminded himself, five now) pitching and rolling in the emptiness of space forever, forgotten by a decimated world. Forgotten by all but the dead, who could not speak, or try to find them.
Sometimes, if he slept long enough, another dream began, one of whispers in the dark. A voice, beseeching him, over and over, wake up, Matthew, wake up. When he did, his hand was clenched over the scar on his chest, and a rush of air stirred his window shades.
It had to be a dream.
i heard a young man calling
The third year, the messengers came.
A man in black, with a long red beard and dark skin. A woman, thin and spare, eyes like a dying sparrow's, a voice like a Shadow's scream. A pair of Centauri twins who only spoke to him and to each other and shunned the rest of the crew. Once, a Minbari girl, barely out of her teens, who took Eilerson's paycheck at poker and taught Dureena a complicated string game that puzzled her for days.
They knelt at his feet and they swore themselves to his service. They told him of places he hadn't yet searched, full of toxins. Worlds he'd never heard of, ravaged by disease. They bore strange gifts: crystals, scrolls, clues, mysteries. They pledged themselves to his cause.
They never said who sent them.
so the young would see the morn
The fourth year, the old and the sick died, felled sooner than expected, and the panic began. Dureena's people, on their lonely planet, stopped transmitting, the last of them sending her a message, "Remember." She punched a dent into the bulkhead, and wept, in Eilerson's arms. Later, Matheson showed her the archive of all their messages, and she gave it to Max. He taught her the software to index it; she started to work.
Sarah updated the death toll every day on a board on the Medlab door. Her nurses began making notes, from things they heard on ISN, letters from home, official Earthforce bulletins. Riots in Washington. Jakarta's gone dark. Paris, there's a fire, we think. Seventeen hundred dead, their transport shot down on the quarantine line. Most of them children.
Once, the nurses tacked up a photograph of a grandmother, the wrinkled and weathered woman raising her head and smiling proudly at the camera, the tube in her arm barely noticeable. Opiate injection, Sarah told Gideon. She died painlessly, quickly. After, and unlike, the rest of her family.
He imagined the sounds back home. Screaming. Glass breaking.
A burning city. A buried house.
It was silent on the ship, much of the time. They heard one another breathe. Gideon woke up seeing his door close, and thought, I am losing my mind.
And then, on a moon near the Rim where a mage led them, they found it.
It had been there all along, waiting for them.
she watched the last star rising
The fifth year, they went home.
And all they expected to happen, didn't.
by a windswept harbor wall
Awards hang heavy on Matthew Gideon's chest now, gather much dust on his desk. He is old now, too old to care for applause. It once rang in his ears for days; as the Excalibur sailed back into port for the first time he thought he would never tire of it. He is tired of it now.
Tired of shaking hands, giving speeches, tired of smiling. Tired of the holes in the stories he tells.
The ceremony was mercifully brief. Gideon let the door slide shut behind him and leans against it, grateful for this bulwark between him and all the people who wanted to thank him.
Who don't understand that at some point you grow comfortable with the company of the dead, and the living become intolerable. Who don't see that defeat ends a cause, a quest, but victory changes it, draws it out, makes it neverending.
He tossed the brass plaque onto the nearest chair. What do they think he'll do with it, anyway?
It's a chunk of metal. Eleven inches across. And etched upon it, his entire life.
To Matthew Gideon and the crew of the Excalibur,
in commemoration of their extraordinary service and achievement
in discovering a cure for
the Drakh Plague,
and saving the lives of all on Earth.
Given on this day, 12 May 2295.
The 25th anniversary of their victory.
*Believe that life is worth living,
and your belief will help create the fact.
—William James*
a prison ship lies waiting in the bay
When he was sure they'd gone, he went for a walk. The corridor was quiet. Visiting hours long over.
The convention center was built around the ship; as museum, as tourist attraction, as meeting place. Everywhere you went, from every floor, you could look out a window and see the Excalibur.
They said the plague changed everything. That it forced a race whose denial of its own mortality bordered on the epic to confront that mortality at last, and begin living better lives.
Up ahead of him, a little girl walked, holding her mother's hand. Pink ribbons were braided into her hair, and she pointed at the ship, tugging on her mother's sleeve.
"Is that it, Momma?" she asked. "Is that the ship that found the cure?"
Gideon hid a bitter smile. Twenty-five years, and this is what they believe.
They said the plague changed everything, but when the taller woman stooped down and said, "Yes, Susan, that's the ship that cured the plague," and he saw the glint of diamonds in her ears, he had to fight down anger. So much hadn't changed.
And he longed, suddenly and fiercely, to walk up to these two, the smaller of whom will never remember this day, and offer to take them aboard the ship of the cure. To blow the docking restraints, dust off the engines, and take them for the ride of their lives.
He wanted to feel the Excalibur's deck tilt beneath his feet, to hum along with its awesome power as it sped through space, lifting, standing up on tiptoe, straining with it, as if by leaning forward he can make it go faster, faster …
And Sarah would be down the hall, bitching about not having enough of a medical library to run a free clinic on Mars much less this flying biology lab. Matheson would be standing there, with that knowing smile on his face that convinced Eilerson the teep was scanning him whether he said so or not. Dureena would be arguing with Galen over something, anything, what color the sky was on his world, never needing an excuse to pick a fight. Galen …
Galen.
Would be looking at him, quiet and steady, sure in his heart for both of them that Gideon was doing the right thing. Going to the right places. Plotting the right course.
After twenty-five years, he found he missed, most of all, the times when the mage simply went with them, wherever they chose to travel.
against the famine and the crown
He woke that night gasping for breath.
Row after row of crosses. Toronto. Reykjavik. New Delhi.
Sarah. Sarah, don't. Sarah, stop. Sarah, God, Sarah it wasn't your fault!
A breeze stirred his window shades.
"Stop," he said. Sharper than he'd intended.
"Don't leave. Not this time."
The figure by his door froze. Turned, slowly, and faced him.
"As you wish, Matthew."
low lie the fields of athenry
He didn't turn on the lights. The coffee pot spit its pungent fumes into the air. Gideon poured two cups, set one in front of Galen, and asked.
"Why now, Galen?"
The mage smiled.
"Because I knew you'd be here, though I didn't know you'd be alone. I thought Dureena, or perhaps Sarah, would be with you. To accept this honor.
"I lost track of you after you returned. As far as I was concerned, I had performed my task. My work was done." Galen said. "But now, seeing you here, I wish I had kept better tabs on you all. What happened to the others, Matthew?"
He couldn't speak.
"Why are you here alone?"
Gideon had thought, for years now, that he was the only one left, his life everyone's favorite bedtime story. To stare and to point at, and not to understand. To listen patiently, as to a lesson, from a living, tattered book.
And the worst part about it, the worst part about the last of the deaths, was that there was no one left to talk to, no one who remembered that it wasn't all about noble intentions and scientific advancement. That sometimes it was about terrible coffee light years from home, and one of the new ensigns screwing up and setting off the ship's collision alarm at 4 a.m., so that Matheson stumbled out of bed and onto the bridge in pajamas that, Sarah delighted in pointing out, had little pictures of hot dogs and fries on them.
It was about Eilerson's low, surprisingly powerful voice, reading from a dog-eared volume. "Then folk do long to go on pilgrimage, and palmers to go seeking out strange strands, to distant shrines well-known in distant lands." Reassuring them that they were not, after all, the first to face a scourge upon their earth.
Nor would they be the last. And now this man, unforgiving and unforgiven, this one-time friend, would be his confessor.
"Sarah killed herself," Gideon heard himself say, softly. "It was about a year after we got back. The cure was disseminated. They were sure the plague was gone. So they held a ceremony. Led us out on a dais. Thousands cheered."
Sarah looked out over the crowd, her cold hand in Gideon's, fingers around his very tight. There was not a face in their audience older than fifty. Not a face younger than twelve. And in the distance, over the brow of the stadium wall--
"There was a cemetery, next to the amphitheater," Gideon whispered, feeling, rather than seeing, Galen's hands come up to steady his shoulders. "We were celebrating in a field of the plague dead. Hill after hill of gravestones, as far as any of us could see. They were cheering our victory in the face of our failure, and Sarah--"
She dropped his hand and walked off the stage. Hours later, Matheson found the doctor. She knew toxins. She knew poisons. She knew how to make it work.
"She couldn't stand it," Gideon said, shaking off the younger man's comfort, moving away, taking a few deep breaths that did nothing to cleanse his mind of the horrors of the years. "There were so many we couldn't save."
"You saved millions, Matthew." Galen's voice was gentle.
"But we should have saved them all." His voice shook; he made it steady again. "Our job was to save them all."
"It was an impossible task. You knew that when it was given to you."
He forced himself to look up, even smile, a grimace of bitter amusement. "It never stopped me before."
After that, the others scattered. Dureena left with Max, on a quest of her own. If there was one lost colony, Max convinced her, there might be more. That Max had grown used to her company was not something the mercenary was willing to admit.
"They died in a cave-in on Riga Seven sixteen years ago," he said. "They were tunneling. Using outdated explosives. Max always did things on the cheap."
Dureena's last message to him had been a simple, "Happy Birthday."
"John Matheson was stationed on the Rim after the Cure," Gideon said. "There was a knife fight, of all things, in a bar. And I had no idea where you were. If you were even alive."
This time Galen looked away.
"I lived," he said softly. "I could not bring myself to face you, could not bring myself to contact you. But I lived, and I watched you, in my own way, as long as I could."
"You sent the messengers," Gideon said, soft but sure.
"Yes." Gideon saw, in the low light of early morning breaking across the horizon, how the weight had dropped from the mage over the years, how thin he was, how gray. "It was all I could do, I found, to atone."
"You gave us the cure, Galen. You know that."
Galen smiled again, tentatively. Gideon remembered the mage in the early days of the Excalibur's mission, his default modes of communication black humor and blind rage. This was neither, and it was humbling, and it hurt.
"'Too little payment,'" Galen said quietly, "'for so great a debt.'"
Gideon's vision blurred. Damn old age and weakness, he thought savagely, dashing a hand across his eyes.
They both stood silent then, two forgotten stories, their lives an amusement park for others to experience, and then go home. So much hadn't changed.
"What will you do now, Matthew?" Alone among all of them, he'd never acknowledged Gideon's rank. Even Dureena, until the day she died, called him captain. Even Max.
"I don't know," Gideon admitted, surprised. "Since I retired from Earthforce, I've been a sort of professional public speaker. I've gotten very good at telling high school kids and businessmen about the role of persistence and determination in success. I've gotten very good at giving interviews.
"But I was thinking, after this last ceremonial occasion, I might give that up. I might find myself a ship, and just go somewhere. See what it's like to move under my own power. Beholden to no one."
Galen nodded. "A condition with which I am intimately acquainted," he said. "Where will you go?"
"I don't know."
To Gideon's surprise, a smile spread across Galen's face, and the mage held out a hand.
"Do you mind if I go with you?"
where once we watched the small free birds fly
The twenty-sixth year, a small dark ship left Earthdock in the night, without filing a departure notice. And when the directors of the Excalibur Plague Museum went to Matthew Gideon's rooms to say goodbye and see him off, they found his quarters empty.
*By a lonely prison wall, I heard a young girl calling
"Michael, they have taken you away,
For you stole Trevelyan's corn,
So the young might see the morn.
Now a prison ship lies waiting in the bay."
By a lonely prison wall, I heard a young man calling
"Nothing matters, Mary, when you're free
Against the famine and the crown,
I rebelled, they cut me down.
Now you must raise our child with dignity."
By a windswept harbor wall, she watched the last star falling
As the prison ship sailed out against the sky
For she lived to hope and pray for her love in Botany Bay
It's so lonely round the fields of Athenry.
Low lie the fields of Athenry
Where once we watched the small free birds fly
Our love was on the wing
We had dreams and songs to sing
It's so lonely round the fields of Athenry. *