They're ain't nobody to love...
With the Multiverse 2005 authors revealed I can now say with 100% certainty that babylil wrote my Janeway/ Weir story. I totally spotted it! And then I rememered that comment you made about *finally* answering a Bordello challenge... Heh! Backwards fic! Anyway, thanks babe!
I can also now tell you about my experiences writing Rodney McKay (Stargate Atlantis)/ River Tam (Firefly) fic - and it wasn't completely crazy (well - the formatting was a little strange for a couple of days but we fixed that) and impossible!
It actually turned out to be a fun pairing. And it made weird sense. I mean, Rodney confesses to liking smart women - and who's smarter than River?
Anyway, if you're interested, here's the typo-free version.
Title: The Big Bang and Everything After
Fandom: Firefly/ Stargate Atlantis
Pairing: Rodney/ River
Rating: PG-13
Summary: “If she listens hard enough she can hear the ‘verse singing its creation.”
Author’s Notes: For Bud-Clare for the Multiverse 2005. Set pre-movie for Firefly and soon after “The Siege” for SGA.
They meet the ice-man on Veda. River feels him as they land, feels all of them, actually, and she shivers with cold on the sun burnt surface of Veda. Simon puts his hand to her face, feeling for a fever. She waves him away, tells him it’s the ice-man’s doing. The ice-man is making the most noise down there, screaming the loudest.
"What's she talking about?" the Captain says.
Simon shakes his head. "I have no idea.”
Kaylee looks at River, worry lines creasing her forehead. Kaylee worries about them all at some time of another but she worries about River the most. River causes trouble.
None of the others are paying attention. Zoe and Wash are fighting over something only they understand and Jayne is trying to pretend River doesn’t exist (what doesn’t exist can’t hurt him). The shepherd and the companion are avoiding the sun, standing in the shade of Serenity, admiring the purple tinged sky above the distant mountains.
There's a green man coming to meet them, clothed head to toe in green from his hat to his green rubber boots. He says it stops the crows from attacking him during nesting season and River thinks she would like to see a nest after they’ve visited the ice-man. If the ice-man will leave her be.
The green man leads them to a hole in the ground where the now silent machines have been digging for water.
"I found them in here," he says, waving at a large metal box uncovered by the machines. They step down into the hole and the green man opens the door to the box. "Veda was an Alliance space dump before the war. I guess they forgot about it after."
Inside, there’s twenty-two chambers, all along the walls, all the way around. The Captain wants to know if they're still alive.
River's quicker to answer than the green man. "All alive," she says. "Every one of them."
River listens to the ice-man, follows his voice until she finds his chamber. She taps on the glass and there's moisture on her fingers. When she wipes it away she can see the ice-man with his eyes closed, not sleeping.
The Captain is telling the green man that he doesn't like it, doesn’t like the idea of transporting cryos at all let alone cryos of indeterminate age. The Captain doesn't trust anyone, frozen or not.
"We're not equipped to transport temperature regulated cargo," the Captain says.
The ice-man grows impatient. River remembers ice, remembers what it feels like to be and not be. After everything she experienced at the Academy, she found it peaceful in there. The ice-man doesn’t feel the same.
"We could wake 'em up?" Kaylee says. River knows Kaylee feels the ice-man's pain too. Feels it differently to River but feels it all the same. Kaylee is thinking about ice, thinking about her breath freezing in her throat. Kaylee thinks she never wants to be frozen. Never.
"They're not asleep," River says. The ice-man is awake and screaming to be let out. There are panels on the side of the chamber and Rivers knows it’s just a matter of getting the sequence right. She puts her ear to the metal and listens. Hard surfaces sing the songs of their vibrations, echoing every touch. If she listens hard enough she can hear the ‘verse singing its creation, the moment when the particles broke away and stretched out into the void.
She keys in the sequence and no one is quick enough to stop her.
Simon calls out, "River!" and the Captain quickly grabs her and pulls her away, but the ice-man is already breaking free from the glacier, already sucking in air, burning his lungs with his own breath.
They watch him, everyone waiting to see what happens. It's so exciting that even Zoe and Wash have stopped fighting and are staring in anticipation, waiting for the ice-man to come out.
The ice-man chokes and coughs, but his eyes are open and he's looking right at them. He is moving his mouth, open and closed, open and closed, but nothing comes out.
"He's saying something," the Captain says. He steps closer, always braver than the rest. He leans in, ear first, listening for the ice-man's first words.
River knows what the ice-man is saying and she giggles and clasps her hand against her mouth.
The Captain listens and then he turns back toward the crew, just a little amused. "He says, 'where are my clothes?'"
*
Serenity has twenty-two new passengers filling the cargo hold with their endless questions and desperate thoughts. All claim to be from Earth That Was but none of them know how they got there or even know each other. The Shepherd searches for their names in the Cortex, accessing archives the Serenity crew have never heard of before, but there’s no mention of the passengers anywhere. It’s a mystery. The Captain doesn’t like mysteries and he tells the crew he’s leaving the passengers at the nearest civilization.
The ice-man isn't naked anymore. He’s wearing Jayne’s pants and Simon’s shirt. They all pitched in so they passengers would have clothes and now they are a mix and match of Serenity’s crew. River gave the girl with the black hair one of her dresses. The girl with the black hair looks younger than River but she says she remembers being twenty-seven. She says she was dying, probably still is. She never asked to be frozen.
The ice-man is still the loudest, still the one she hears above others.
"You don't understand," the ice-man says to anyone who'll listen. "I wasn't supposed to be cryogenically frozen. I wasn't sick. I wasn't dying. I was in another galaxy, in the city of the Ancients. Surely you’ve heard of the Ancients by now?”
Simon examines the ice-man twice because he thinks the ice-man is delusional. Simon says some of the passengers are sick, diseased with the plagues of Earth That Was. They can be cured now. Core planets like Ariel and Shibhon have treatments in the water.
None of the passengers rant and rave like the ice-man.
“The last thing I remember I was back on Earth,” the ice-man is saying. “It was temporary, though. The Asgard gave us a ship, and we were going back. Surely you’ve heard of the Stargate programme? General O’Neill? Colonel Samantha Carter? Dr Weir? Major Sheppard? These names should be famous. What happened to Atlantis? For that matter, what happened to Earth?"
River listens. The ice-man has an interesting story about a city underwater that rose to the surface of a planet and was attacked by vampires.
"The lost city," she says. "All that searching and you found it over the horizon."
"That's right," the ice-man says, curious as to why she seems to know what he’s talking about when no one else does. "The Stargate was an event horizon artificially created. We went through it into the Pegasus galaxy. What happened to it?"
"It’s a story the Extra-terrestrialists spread,” Simon says. He studies the ice-man’s brain scans, flips through them one after the other on the screen, shaking his head when he finds nothing abnormal. “They say it happened in the time before the Alliance. People of Earth That Was built a space ship and sent it to a far off galaxy to find human ancestors or little green men like the ones that apparently crashed their space craft in old Mexico."
"And the ghouls," River says. "The ghouls with the yellow eyes and the snakes around their neck."
"Children's stories," Simon says.
"And like so many children's stories they're based in fact,” the ice-man says. He stands behind Simon and looks at the brain scans. He screws up his face, unsure of what he’s seeing. “The Goa'uld are intelligent amphibious-like parasites who take human hosts. They implant themselves around the spinal chord causing the eyes to glow. I never saw it happen, but I'm told it was extraordinary to watch."
Simon is unable to find anything wrong with the ice-man. “You don’t remember anything about being frozen?” Simon says. “This Dr Weir - was she a medical doctor?”
“No,” the ice-man says impatiently. “And she wasn’t a psychiatrist either. I was not institutionalized, nor was I infirmed. I am telling you, I was in perfect health, and I was part of a secret government programme, using an ancient device to travel to other planets.”
“I think you should stay in the infirmary tonight,” Simon says. “Just for observation.”
“Anything is better than the cattle hold,” the ice-man says resignedly.
River thinks of the lost city buried under water. The ice-man came back to life too, just like the city.
*
The passengers are left on Ariel at a central authority facility. Simon leaves them with the best advice he can think of: drink the water. The ice-man fixes the glitch in the cortex wave detection programme and reduces the margin of error in the sensors a full .5 % so the Captain lets him stay.
He still speaks of the lost city underwater. Simon still can’t find anything wrong with him. The Captain gives the ice-man a storage space to sleep in and a rolled up foam mat for a bed. River and Simon share their blankets with him. The ice-man complains about everything except the bricks. He eats them heartily and says they taste like “emarees.”
The Captain keeps threatening to space the ice-man. River tells the ice-man that the Captain has already threatened to space her, Simon and Jayne (several times) so the ice-man probably shouldn’t worry.
*
She asks Simon for paper to write on and he gives her an old book with faded words. She pulls the book apart and rearranges the pages on the floor of the kitchen, sixteen by twelve.
The shepherd gives her a piece of wax to write with. It’s red, contrasting with the faded ink on the pages. She fills the margins and the spaces between the lines with numbers and symbols. She makes them up at times because numbers are imperfect and some formula is better worked backwards. It’s more convenient than complicated. She doesn’t have a lot of paper.
The ice-man comes into the kitchen and gets to his knees beside her.
“What are you doing?” he says.
“Mian tiao,” she says. “I’ve found the formula.”
“So I see…” He rubs his chin and nods, and then his eyes go wide. “This is incredible. What’s this?” He points to a symbol, a picture of a hand. He doesn’t wait for her explanation. “No, wait - what’s this?” He points to two curved lines.
“Noodles,” she says. “Mian tiao.”
“Noodles?” he says. “This equation - this formula - is for the critical mass of a traversable wormhole, a stargate wormhole, no less. Your end result is noodles?”
“Gravity,’ she says. “Turns you into noodles if you don’t get it right.”
“Noodles,” he nods. He touches the numbers, runs his hand along the equation, as if he can feel its permutations. “This is the exact size and negative energy quotient of the Ancients’ stargates. I made a model in my lab at area 51. How did you know?”
“Isenberg’s Wormhole theory. Published 2139. I read it in third grade.”
The ice-man is horrified. “2139? I devised a working model of a traversable wormhole in 2001. Who the hell is Isenberg?”
”Doesn’t matter,” she says. She points to second row. “He got it wrong. I had to fix this part.”
He stares at her, incredulous. “You fixed it?”
“They wouldn’t let me build one in class,” she says. “They said I’d destroy reality. I told them that reality is a construction and I could only have destroy it as they perceive it but they weren’t listening.”
“There concern was justified,” the ice-man says. “You would have to simultaneously create a counteractive gravitational field or everyone would be irresistibly drawn into your wormhole - depending on the size of course.”
“I thought of that,” she says. She points to a line closer to the bottom of the page. “Here.’
The ice-man stares, from River to the formula and back to River again. “Does the number 44071 mean anything to you?”
“Prime.”
“The next one?”
“44087.”
“The next?”
“44089.”
The ice-man takes the wax and writes down the numbers. “If I told you to keep counting how high could you go?”
“I’d need to go to the bathroom eventually.”
He nods. “Of course,” he says. “Just keep going and we’ll stop when we get to that point.”
“44101, 44111…”
When she gets to 44257 the ice-man tells her to stop.
“They should have let you build that wormhole,” he says.
*
"She clearly has the gene," the ice-man says. He is following Simon around the infirmary. River sits on the bed with her feet crossed. Next to her the shepherd leans against the bed, holding his chin in his hand. "You probably do as well, but she's clearly one of them. It’s like she’s partially ascended already - if that's possible."
"The Academy opened up her brain and excited her amygdala," Simon says. "She's no more alien than you or me. Although, you I'm not so sure about."
"The Ancients weren't alien - well, they were but we're related to them so they're not aliens like the Asgard or the Nox…”
Simon stops the ice-man, holds him by the shoulder and shines a pen-light in his eye. "I can't understand it," Simon says, pocketing the pen-light. "You seem perfectly healthy."
"For the last time," the ice-man says. "It was real. The stargate was real. The aliens were real. An entire war took place in the space above Earth - twice. They covered it up to stop widespread panic."
"The farthermost edges of the colonies haven’t encountered life at all," the shepherd says. “Intelligent or otherwise.
"I don’t know why that is," the ice-man says. "It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Asgard was the home of the Norse gods,” River says. “Nox the Roman goddess of night.”
“Asgard is an orbital satellite mining station off Thebus,” the shepherd says. “They mine the asteroid belt.”
“Clearly, whoever named these planets made liberal use of Earth’s mythologies,” the ice-man says. “It’s nice to know three thousand years of culture wasn’t completely forgotten.”
“You shouldn’t be here, anyway,” River says. “Wei Jun invented the cryogenic chamber in 2089.”
They all stop. Simon looks at the shepherd as if he thinks the shepherd might provide an explanation. The shepherd shrugs. “The chambers were a unique design,” he says.
“It wouldn’t be the first time the Alliance re-wrote history,” Simon says, but it’s not convincing.
They all look at the ice-man differently after that, worried that there might be truth to what he’s saying.
The shepherd is the only one who asks her what she thinks. She tells him that the ice-man has memories so real he can touch them with his mind, feel their curves and hard edges as if he were holding them in his hands.
*
Sitting on the steps of the cargo hold, the ice-man asks her questions, questions only she and the ice-man understand. Uncertainty theory, unification theory - concepts devised in an age of scientific discovery. She explains with her hands, draws a picture in the space in front of them.
"Yes, fine," the ice-man says, following the movement of her hands. It's 'night' on Serenity. Everyone is asleep. "But you've used yourself as a base reference point which means you are central to your theory - and while I appreciate the poetics I'm thinking of something much larger when I think of unification theory."
"I am the 'verse," she says
"You see, metaphorically that makes sense but there's spatial and temporal distinction between yourself and your externality. Which means you are both part of, and distinct from the universe. Or 'verse as you call it."
And she laughs because the ice-man has never met a 'verse. Not even the one inside him.
He is patient with her now, listening to her like a disciple. River knows he wants answers and he thinks she has them.
When she touches his face, fingers brushing his eyelashes, resting on his eyelids, he is still. She puts her lips on his and he doesn't move. She touches his chest, feeling for his heart. It's still there, beating fast.
"You really can’t...” he says. "I mean, I can't... how old are you anyway?"
"As old as the ‘verse," she says. The ‘verse is relative. She proved it with her hands. She has always existed. She will always exist. "Also, I've seen you naked."
"I've been trying to forget that," he says. “The polite thing is to pretend you already have.”
“Manners form part of a collective’s identity,” she says. “They differentiate between the foreign and the familiar in a crowd.”
“I don’t say this often,” the ice-man says. “But you are a lot smarter than me.”
She hooks her arm around his, and leans against his shoulder. From the ice-man that’s a promise as binding as a ring around her finger.
*
When the ice-man sleeps, Simon comes to River with the worry lines and dark spaces under his eyes that weren’t there before she went away. "Isn't he a little old for you, River?" he says. She is in the engine room, watching Serenity spin, watching from the place where Kaylee watches. "I mean, really old."
"Time is irrelevant," she says.
“Experience isn’t.”
“Are you afraid of her?” she says.
“Who?”
“Kaylee is more experienced than you.”
Simon is embarrassed. He laughs nervously, looks away, trying to cover himself. “This is not about Kaylee.”
Simon is a terrible liar. He was never good at pretending. “Don’t worry,” River says. “I’ll protect you.” She smiles at him, and Simon looks away again, hiding his face. The Captain says it’s fun to tease Simon, and it is, if only because Simon looks pretty when his cheeks turn pink.
*
The ice-man likes watching the stars so he sits with Wash sometimes, talks about things Wash doesn't understand but will listen to anyway. The ice-man is always talking.
"... Naquadah would solve your energy problems," the ice-man is saying to Wash. "We could build a reactor in your engine - which is already generating a sizeable EM field. Of course we'd also need to build a containment unit but I've noticed your engineer is very resourceful. She could probably construct one out of hair pins."
"Nakadah," Wash says. "Never heard of it."
"NaQUAdah,” the ice-man says. “You probably wouldn’t know it if you saw it - more’s the pity. It could be all over these planets, wasting away. Some farmer probably thinks it’s just useless rock in the way of a rice crop and has it piled up in a field somewhere."
River can make herself invisible. She fades into the shadows, walks on air so no one can hear her steps. She sneaks up behind the ice-man, covers his eyes.
"Let me guess..." the ice-man says. "Kaylee?"
She laughs and takes her hands away. The ice-man pretends to be surprised and Wash shakes his head. "Children, behave," Wash says. "Daddy's working."
Zoe appears in the doorway, demanding a private audience with Wash.
"Mind the ship for me?" Wash says to the ice-man.
"I can't fly.” The ice-man says, panicking. “I've never flown anything. Except for a puddle jumper - and it was nothing like this…” He waves his hands, taking in the entire control room.
"Just call me if anything beeps, flashes or smokes - especially if anything smokes." Wash inclines his head toward River. "Don't let her touch anything. She'll open up a space-time envelope and blast us into another dimension or something." He pauses in the doorway before following Zoe. "She can't do that, can she?"
"Yes," the ice-man says. "Yes, I think she can."
Dimensions collide. They pile up in a heap, criss-cross and dissect each other. Moving from one to the next is a matter of rearranging the 'verse from one disorder to the next. She tells the ice-man this after Wash has gone.
"If you could do that you would disprove chaos theory," he says. "Or at least make it irrelevant."
"Rationalising chaos is irrational," she says. "You're out of time."
"Maybe it's a lack of sleep talking," he says. "But I think I understand you. The age of enlightenment is over. We thought it was over in our time but now I know what it’s like to see that the time has truly gone. This is an age of survival, not discovery. I don't belong here."
The ice-man has many regrets. She can feel them all as he lists them in his head: everything he never did, the things he never said and the people he never said them to. River reaches for his hand and holds it between both of hers. She remembers how Simon would comfort her when she was sad or frightened. She remembers he would make her laugh, tell her something to be happy about.
"Jayne is afraid of me," she says.
"Jayne is not as stupid as he looks," the ice-man says. "Which isn't saying much - Jayne looks very, very stupid."
He looks at her hands around his and for a moment she feels his longing dissipate, for a moment he is happy she is there.
It’s gone quickly, but she feels a sense of achievement all the same.
*
She comes to the ice-man's cabin when he's sleeping, slips under the covers next to him and curls herself around his back, her face buried in his neck. He's not cold anymore.
"Your brother doesn't like you coming here," the ice-man says.
"Simon has never been in cryo," she says. Simon doesn't know what it's like to be alive and not breathing at the same time. She and the ice-man have disappeared and come back. They have the cold in common.
"But you have. Simon told me how he rescued you, how he gave up his future to bring you to this floating garbage truck. I think he wanted me to know how much you meant to him." The ice-man rolls onto his back so he can look at her. "I barely remember my sister. We weren't close. I didn't even go to her wedding. I think she has kids - had kids. I wonder what happened to them?"
She huddles against his side. She likes his back, all broad and long, but it's his body that draws her against him, his wide shoulders and his big hands, the thickness of his neck and the curve of his belly. He's wearing a t-shirt so she pulls up the hem and plays with the hair below his navel.
"I went to a special school," the ice-man says. "Nothing like yours, but I remember I missed my family. A lot. They left me there over summer one year. I thought it was because they didn’t want me or that I’d done something terrible and was being punished. I was studying at a level five years above my age but emotionally I was still a child. When I was older I learned that my parents were having marital difficulties. They thought I’d be better off at school where I didn’t have to watch my parents abuse each other.” The ice-man pauses, thoughtfully. “They might have been right.”
"Termites mate for life," she says. "So do pigeons, but pigeons aren't monogamous."
"My parents were less committed to each other than termites," the ice-man says. "Is it any wonder I could never sustain a relationship?"
She feels them then. They reach through the known fabric of space and time as it exists in the ice-man’s cabin, as it existed for them once. They touch her face, her hands, let her feel their presence, knowing she can help them.
"They’re watching you," she says.
“My parents?”
Not his parents. The others. “The ones you were looking for,” she says.
He frowns, looks at her the way the Captain looks at her when she’s trying to tell him something important. “The Ancients?”
“They say you talk too much.”
“How observant of them,” he says, but she can tell he doesn’t believe her. The ice-man doesn’t know what to believe. He’s tired. She can hear his body labouring over each breath. He wants to rest, want to leave trying to understand the ‘verse - this ‘verse - until tomorrow.
She touches his stomach, his chest, his collarbone. She puts her palm to his neck, counts the beat of his pulse in base five. Five fingers, five toes, five points on a star.
In the beginning they were all together. When they broke away they became thinner and thinner, so thin they could pass through each other without detection. Long before he stepped over the horizon the ice-man studied these remnants of the beginning. He told her he was looking for dark matter, energy that no one had a name for.
The others, the ice-man’s Ancient’s found this energy. They figured out how to pull the remnants together again. She thinks that with her help he could figure it out too and this could be their age of discovery, all of their own.
“Tomorrow we could open up a space-time envelope, blast us into another dimension,” she says. “I could show you how?”
“Tomorrow,” the ice-man says. He yawns and his head droops toward her shoulder. “If we have time.”
Fin.
I can also now tell you about my experiences writing Rodney McKay (Stargate Atlantis)/ River Tam (Firefly) fic - and it wasn't completely crazy (well - the formatting was a little strange for a couple of days but we fixed that) and impossible!
It actually turned out to be a fun pairing. And it made weird sense. I mean, Rodney confesses to liking smart women - and who's smarter than River?
Anyway, if you're interested, here's the typo-free version.
Title: The Big Bang and Everything After
Fandom: Firefly/ Stargate Atlantis
Pairing: Rodney/ River
Rating: PG-13
Summary: “If she listens hard enough she can hear the ‘verse singing its creation.”
Author’s Notes: For Bud-Clare for the Multiverse 2005. Set pre-movie for Firefly and soon after “The Siege” for SGA.
They meet the ice-man on Veda. River feels him as they land, feels all of them, actually, and she shivers with cold on the sun burnt surface of Veda. Simon puts his hand to her face, feeling for a fever. She waves him away, tells him it’s the ice-man’s doing. The ice-man is making the most noise down there, screaming the loudest.
"What's she talking about?" the Captain says.
Simon shakes his head. "I have no idea.”
Kaylee looks at River, worry lines creasing her forehead. Kaylee worries about them all at some time of another but she worries about River the most. River causes trouble.
None of the others are paying attention. Zoe and Wash are fighting over something only they understand and Jayne is trying to pretend River doesn’t exist (what doesn’t exist can’t hurt him). The shepherd and the companion are avoiding the sun, standing in the shade of Serenity, admiring the purple tinged sky above the distant mountains.
There's a green man coming to meet them, clothed head to toe in green from his hat to his green rubber boots. He says it stops the crows from attacking him during nesting season and River thinks she would like to see a nest after they’ve visited the ice-man. If the ice-man will leave her be.
The green man leads them to a hole in the ground where the now silent machines have been digging for water.
"I found them in here," he says, waving at a large metal box uncovered by the machines. They step down into the hole and the green man opens the door to the box. "Veda was an Alliance space dump before the war. I guess they forgot about it after."
Inside, there’s twenty-two chambers, all along the walls, all the way around. The Captain wants to know if they're still alive.
River's quicker to answer than the green man. "All alive," she says. "Every one of them."
River listens to the ice-man, follows his voice until she finds his chamber. She taps on the glass and there's moisture on her fingers. When she wipes it away she can see the ice-man with his eyes closed, not sleeping.
The Captain is telling the green man that he doesn't like it, doesn’t like the idea of transporting cryos at all let alone cryos of indeterminate age. The Captain doesn't trust anyone, frozen or not.
"We're not equipped to transport temperature regulated cargo," the Captain says.
The ice-man grows impatient. River remembers ice, remembers what it feels like to be and not be. After everything she experienced at the Academy, she found it peaceful in there. The ice-man doesn’t feel the same.
"We could wake 'em up?" Kaylee says. River knows Kaylee feels the ice-man's pain too. Feels it differently to River but feels it all the same. Kaylee is thinking about ice, thinking about her breath freezing in her throat. Kaylee thinks she never wants to be frozen. Never.
"They're not asleep," River says. The ice-man is awake and screaming to be let out. There are panels on the side of the chamber and Rivers knows it’s just a matter of getting the sequence right. She puts her ear to the metal and listens. Hard surfaces sing the songs of their vibrations, echoing every touch. If she listens hard enough she can hear the ‘verse singing its creation, the moment when the particles broke away and stretched out into the void.
She keys in the sequence and no one is quick enough to stop her.
Simon calls out, "River!" and the Captain quickly grabs her and pulls her away, but the ice-man is already breaking free from the glacier, already sucking in air, burning his lungs with his own breath.
They watch him, everyone waiting to see what happens. It's so exciting that even Zoe and Wash have stopped fighting and are staring in anticipation, waiting for the ice-man to come out.
The ice-man chokes and coughs, but his eyes are open and he's looking right at them. He is moving his mouth, open and closed, open and closed, but nothing comes out.
"He's saying something," the Captain says. He steps closer, always braver than the rest. He leans in, ear first, listening for the ice-man's first words.
River knows what the ice-man is saying and she giggles and clasps her hand against her mouth.
The Captain listens and then he turns back toward the crew, just a little amused. "He says, 'where are my clothes?'"
*
Serenity has twenty-two new passengers filling the cargo hold with their endless questions and desperate thoughts. All claim to be from Earth That Was but none of them know how they got there or even know each other. The Shepherd searches for their names in the Cortex, accessing archives the Serenity crew have never heard of before, but there’s no mention of the passengers anywhere. It’s a mystery. The Captain doesn’t like mysteries and he tells the crew he’s leaving the passengers at the nearest civilization.
The ice-man isn't naked anymore. He’s wearing Jayne’s pants and Simon’s shirt. They all pitched in so they passengers would have clothes and now they are a mix and match of Serenity’s crew. River gave the girl with the black hair one of her dresses. The girl with the black hair looks younger than River but she says she remembers being twenty-seven. She says she was dying, probably still is. She never asked to be frozen.
The ice-man is still the loudest, still the one she hears above others.
"You don't understand," the ice-man says to anyone who'll listen. "I wasn't supposed to be cryogenically frozen. I wasn't sick. I wasn't dying. I was in another galaxy, in the city of the Ancients. Surely you’ve heard of the Ancients by now?”
Simon examines the ice-man twice because he thinks the ice-man is delusional. Simon says some of the passengers are sick, diseased with the plagues of Earth That Was. They can be cured now. Core planets like Ariel and Shibhon have treatments in the water.
None of the passengers rant and rave like the ice-man.
“The last thing I remember I was back on Earth,” the ice-man is saying. “It was temporary, though. The Asgard gave us a ship, and we were going back. Surely you’ve heard of the Stargate programme? General O’Neill? Colonel Samantha Carter? Dr Weir? Major Sheppard? These names should be famous. What happened to Atlantis? For that matter, what happened to Earth?"
River listens. The ice-man has an interesting story about a city underwater that rose to the surface of a planet and was attacked by vampires.
"The lost city," she says. "All that searching and you found it over the horizon."
"That's right," the ice-man says, curious as to why she seems to know what he’s talking about when no one else does. "The Stargate was an event horizon artificially created. We went through it into the Pegasus galaxy. What happened to it?"
"It’s a story the Extra-terrestrialists spread,” Simon says. He studies the ice-man’s brain scans, flips through them one after the other on the screen, shaking his head when he finds nothing abnormal. “They say it happened in the time before the Alliance. People of Earth That Was built a space ship and sent it to a far off galaxy to find human ancestors or little green men like the ones that apparently crashed their space craft in old Mexico."
"And the ghouls," River says. "The ghouls with the yellow eyes and the snakes around their neck."
"Children's stories," Simon says.
"And like so many children's stories they're based in fact,” the ice-man says. He stands behind Simon and looks at the brain scans. He screws up his face, unsure of what he’s seeing. “The Goa'uld are intelligent amphibious-like parasites who take human hosts. They implant themselves around the spinal chord causing the eyes to glow. I never saw it happen, but I'm told it was extraordinary to watch."
Simon is unable to find anything wrong with the ice-man. “You don’t remember anything about being frozen?” Simon says. “This Dr Weir - was she a medical doctor?”
“No,” the ice-man says impatiently. “And she wasn’t a psychiatrist either. I was not institutionalized, nor was I infirmed. I am telling you, I was in perfect health, and I was part of a secret government programme, using an ancient device to travel to other planets.”
“I think you should stay in the infirmary tonight,” Simon says. “Just for observation.”
“Anything is better than the cattle hold,” the ice-man says resignedly.
River thinks of the lost city buried under water. The ice-man came back to life too, just like the city.
*
The passengers are left on Ariel at a central authority facility. Simon leaves them with the best advice he can think of: drink the water. The ice-man fixes the glitch in the cortex wave detection programme and reduces the margin of error in the sensors a full .5 % so the Captain lets him stay.
He still speaks of the lost city underwater. Simon still can’t find anything wrong with him. The Captain gives the ice-man a storage space to sleep in and a rolled up foam mat for a bed. River and Simon share their blankets with him. The ice-man complains about everything except the bricks. He eats them heartily and says they taste like “emarees.”
The Captain keeps threatening to space the ice-man. River tells the ice-man that the Captain has already threatened to space her, Simon and Jayne (several times) so the ice-man probably shouldn’t worry.
*
She asks Simon for paper to write on and he gives her an old book with faded words. She pulls the book apart and rearranges the pages on the floor of the kitchen, sixteen by twelve.
The shepherd gives her a piece of wax to write with. It’s red, contrasting with the faded ink on the pages. She fills the margins and the spaces between the lines with numbers and symbols. She makes them up at times because numbers are imperfect and some formula is better worked backwards. It’s more convenient than complicated. She doesn’t have a lot of paper.
The ice-man comes into the kitchen and gets to his knees beside her.
“What are you doing?” he says.
“Mian tiao,” she says. “I’ve found the formula.”
“So I see…” He rubs his chin and nods, and then his eyes go wide. “This is incredible. What’s this?” He points to a symbol, a picture of a hand. He doesn’t wait for her explanation. “No, wait - what’s this?” He points to two curved lines.
“Noodles,” she says. “Mian tiao.”
“Noodles?” he says. “This equation - this formula - is for the critical mass of a traversable wormhole, a stargate wormhole, no less. Your end result is noodles?”
“Gravity,’ she says. “Turns you into noodles if you don’t get it right.”
“Noodles,” he nods. He touches the numbers, runs his hand along the equation, as if he can feel its permutations. “This is the exact size and negative energy quotient of the Ancients’ stargates. I made a model in my lab at area 51. How did you know?”
“Isenberg’s Wormhole theory. Published 2139. I read it in third grade.”
The ice-man is horrified. “2139? I devised a working model of a traversable wormhole in 2001. Who the hell is Isenberg?”
”Doesn’t matter,” she says. She points to second row. “He got it wrong. I had to fix this part.”
He stares at her, incredulous. “You fixed it?”
“They wouldn’t let me build one in class,” she says. “They said I’d destroy reality. I told them that reality is a construction and I could only have destroy it as they perceive it but they weren’t listening.”
“There concern was justified,” the ice-man says. “You would have to simultaneously create a counteractive gravitational field or everyone would be irresistibly drawn into your wormhole - depending on the size of course.”
“I thought of that,” she says. She points to a line closer to the bottom of the page. “Here.’
The ice-man stares, from River to the formula and back to River again. “Does the number 44071 mean anything to you?”
“Prime.”
“The next one?”
“44087.”
“The next?”
“44089.”
The ice-man takes the wax and writes down the numbers. “If I told you to keep counting how high could you go?”
“I’d need to go to the bathroom eventually.”
He nods. “Of course,” he says. “Just keep going and we’ll stop when we get to that point.”
“44101, 44111…”
When she gets to 44257 the ice-man tells her to stop.
“They should have let you build that wormhole,” he says.
*
"She clearly has the gene," the ice-man says. He is following Simon around the infirmary. River sits on the bed with her feet crossed. Next to her the shepherd leans against the bed, holding his chin in his hand. "You probably do as well, but she's clearly one of them. It’s like she’s partially ascended already - if that's possible."
"The Academy opened up her brain and excited her amygdala," Simon says. "She's no more alien than you or me. Although, you I'm not so sure about."
"The Ancients weren't alien - well, they were but we're related to them so they're not aliens like the Asgard or the Nox…”
Simon stops the ice-man, holds him by the shoulder and shines a pen-light in his eye. "I can't understand it," Simon says, pocketing the pen-light. "You seem perfectly healthy."
"For the last time," the ice-man says. "It was real. The stargate was real. The aliens were real. An entire war took place in the space above Earth - twice. They covered it up to stop widespread panic."
"The farthermost edges of the colonies haven’t encountered life at all," the shepherd says. “Intelligent or otherwise.
"I don’t know why that is," the ice-man says. "It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Asgard was the home of the Norse gods,” River says. “Nox the Roman goddess of night.”
“Asgard is an orbital satellite mining station off Thebus,” the shepherd says. “They mine the asteroid belt.”
“Clearly, whoever named these planets made liberal use of Earth’s mythologies,” the ice-man says. “It’s nice to know three thousand years of culture wasn’t completely forgotten.”
“You shouldn’t be here, anyway,” River says. “Wei Jun invented the cryogenic chamber in 2089.”
They all stop. Simon looks at the shepherd as if he thinks the shepherd might provide an explanation. The shepherd shrugs. “The chambers were a unique design,” he says.
“It wouldn’t be the first time the Alliance re-wrote history,” Simon says, but it’s not convincing.
They all look at the ice-man differently after that, worried that there might be truth to what he’s saying.
The shepherd is the only one who asks her what she thinks. She tells him that the ice-man has memories so real he can touch them with his mind, feel their curves and hard edges as if he were holding them in his hands.
*
Sitting on the steps of the cargo hold, the ice-man asks her questions, questions only she and the ice-man understand. Uncertainty theory, unification theory - concepts devised in an age of scientific discovery. She explains with her hands, draws a picture in the space in front of them.
"Yes, fine," the ice-man says, following the movement of her hands. It's 'night' on Serenity. Everyone is asleep. "But you've used yourself as a base reference point which means you are central to your theory - and while I appreciate the poetics I'm thinking of something much larger when I think of unification theory."
"I am the 'verse," she says
"You see, metaphorically that makes sense but there's spatial and temporal distinction between yourself and your externality. Which means you are both part of, and distinct from the universe. Or 'verse as you call it."
And she laughs because the ice-man has never met a 'verse. Not even the one inside him.
He is patient with her now, listening to her like a disciple. River knows he wants answers and he thinks she has them.
When she touches his face, fingers brushing his eyelashes, resting on his eyelids, he is still. She puts her lips on his and he doesn't move. She touches his chest, feeling for his heart. It's still there, beating fast.
"You really can’t...” he says. "I mean, I can't... how old are you anyway?"
"As old as the ‘verse," she says. The ‘verse is relative. She proved it with her hands. She has always existed. She will always exist. "Also, I've seen you naked."
"I've been trying to forget that," he says. “The polite thing is to pretend you already have.”
“Manners form part of a collective’s identity,” she says. “They differentiate between the foreign and the familiar in a crowd.”
“I don’t say this often,” the ice-man says. “But you are a lot smarter than me.”
She hooks her arm around his, and leans against his shoulder. From the ice-man that’s a promise as binding as a ring around her finger.
*
When the ice-man sleeps, Simon comes to River with the worry lines and dark spaces under his eyes that weren’t there before she went away. "Isn't he a little old for you, River?" he says. She is in the engine room, watching Serenity spin, watching from the place where Kaylee watches. "I mean, really old."
"Time is irrelevant," she says.
“Experience isn’t.”
“Are you afraid of her?” she says.
“Who?”
“Kaylee is more experienced than you.”
Simon is embarrassed. He laughs nervously, looks away, trying to cover himself. “This is not about Kaylee.”
Simon is a terrible liar. He was never good at pretending. “Don’t worry,” River says. “I’ll protect you.” She smiles at him, and Simon looks away again, hiding his face. The Captain says it’s fun to tease Simon, and it is, if only because Simon looks pretty when his cheeks turn pink.
*
The ice-man likes watching the stars so he sits with Wash sometimes, talks about things Wash doesn't understand but will listen to anyway. The ice-man is always talking.
"... Naquadah would solve your energy problems," the ice-man is saying to Wash. "We could build a reactor in your engine - which is already generating a sizeable EM field. Of course we'd also need to build a containment unit but I've noticed your engineer is very resourceful. She could probably construct one out of hair pins."
"Nakadah," Wash says. "Never heard of it."
"NaQUAdah,” the ice-man says. “You probably wouldn’t know it if you saw it - more’s the pity. It could be all over these planets, wasting away. Some farmer probably thinks it’s just useless rock in the way of a rice crop and has it piled up in a field somewhere."
River can make herself invisible. She fades into the shadows, walks on air so no one can hear her steps. She sneaks up behind the ice-man, covers his eyes.
"Let me guess..." the ice-man says. "Kaylee?"
She laughs and takes her hands away. The ice-man pretends to be surprised and Wash shakes his head. "Children, behave," Wash says. "Daddy's working."
Zoe appears in the doorway, demanding a private audience with Wash.
"Mind the ship for me?" Wash says to the ice-man.
"I can't fly.” The ice-man says, panicking. “I've never flown anything. Except for a puddle jumper - and it was nothing like this…” He waves his hands, taking in the entire control room.
"Just call me if anything beeps, flashes or smokes - especially if anything smokes." Wash inclines his head toward River. "Don't let her touch anything. She'll open up a space-time envelope and blast us into another dimension or something." He pauses in the doorway before following Zoe. "She can't do that, can she?"
"Yes," the ice-man says. "Yes, I think she can."
Dimensions collide. They pile up in a heap, criss-cross and dissect each other. Moving from one to the next is a matter of rearranging the 'verse from one disorder to the next. She tells the ice-man this after Wash has gone.
"If you could do that you would disprove chaos theory," he says. "Or at least make it irrelevant."
"Rationalising chaos is irrational," she says. "You're out of time."
"Maybe it's a lack of sleep talking," he says. "But I think I understand you. The age of enlightenment is over. We thought it was over in our time but now I know what it’s like to see that the time has truly gone. This is an age of survival, not discovery. I don't belong here."
The ice-man has many regrets. She can feel them all as he lists them in his head: everything he never did, the things he never said and the people he never said them to. River reaches for his hand and holds it between both of hers. She remembers how Simon would comfort her when she was sad or frightened. She remembers he would make her laugh, tell her something to be happy about.
"Jayne is afraid of me," she says.
"Jayne is not as stupid as he looks," the ice-man says. "Which isn't saying much - Jayne looks very, very stupid."
He looks at her hands around his and for a moment she feels his longing dissipate, for a moment he is happy she is there.
It’s gone quickly, but she feels a sense of achievement all the same.
*
She comes to the ice-man's cabin when he's sleeping, slips under the covers next to him and curls herself around his back, her face buried in his neck. He's not cold anymore.
"Your brother doesn't like you coming here," the ice-man says.
"Simon has never been in cryo," she says. Simon doesn't know what it's like to be alive and not breathing at the same time. She and the ice-man have disappeared and come back. They have the cold in common.
"But you have. Simon told me how he rescued you, how he gave up his future to bring you to this floating garbage truck. I think he wanted me to know how much you meant to him." The ice-man rolls onto his back so he can look at her. "I barely remember my sister. We weren't close. I didn't even go to her wedding. I think she has kids - had kids. I wonder what happened to them?"
She huddles against his side. She likes his back, all broad and long, but it's his body that draws her against him, his wide shoulders and his big hands, the thickness of his neck and the curve of his belly. He's wearing a t-shirt so she pulls up the hem and plays with the hair below his navel.
"I went to a special school," the ice-man says. "Nothing like yours, but I remember I missed my family. A lot. They left me there over summer one year. I thought it was because they didn’t want me or that I’d done something terrible and was being punished. I was studying at a level five years above my age but emotionally I was still a child. When I was older I learned that my parents were having marital difficulties. They thought I’d be better off at school where I didn’t have to watch my parents abuse each other.” The ice-man pauses, thoughtfully. “They might have been right.”
"Termites mate for life," she says. "So do pigeons, but pigeons aren't monogamous."
"My parents were less committed to each other than termites," the ice-man says. "Is it any wonder I could never sustain a relationship?"
She feels them then. They reach through the known fabric of space and time as it exists in the ice-man’s cabin, as it existed for them once. They touch her face, her hands, let her feel their presence, knowing she can help them.
"They’re watching you," she says.
“My parents?”
Not his parents. The others. “The ones you were looking for,” she says.
He frowns, looks at her the way the Captain looks at her when she’s trying to tell him something important. “The Ancients?”
“They say you talk too much.”
“How observant of them,” he says, but she can tell he doesn’t believe her. The ice-man doesn’t know what to believe. He’s tired. She can hear his body labouring over each breath. He wants to rest, want to leave trying to understand the ‘verse - this ‘verse - until tomorrow.
She touches his stomach, his chest, his collarbone. She puts her palm to his neck, counts the beat of his pulse in base five. Five fingers, five toes, five points on a star.
In the beginning they were all together. When they broke away they became thinner and thinner, so thin they could pass through each other without detection. Long before he stepped over the horizon the ice-man studied these remnants of the beginning. He told her he was looking for dark matter, energy that no one had a name for.
The others, the ice-man’s Ancient’s found this energy. They figured out how to pull the remnants together again. She thinks that with her help he could figure it out too and this could be their age of discovery, all of their own.
“Tomorrow we could open up a space-time envelope, blast us into another dimension,” she says. “I could show you how?”
“Tomorrow,” the ice-man says. He yawns and his head droops toward her shoulder. “If we have time.”
Fin.