Chapter 1
Moya lay quietly in space, listening to the stars--the regular beat of the pulsars, the strange whispers of ancient giants, and the awful silence of black holes.
She had tried to ignore the problem, hoping that it would just go away. But it hadn't. For some time now, she'd been aware that something wasn't right inside, but now great waves of pain were rolling through her--convulsing her; confusing her. She shuddered and gave in. She was seriously ill.
Moya cut her main drive and simply drifted, the light of distant suns reflecting from her skinsteel hull in an ever-changing kaleidoscope of color. She didn't know what was wrong and she was frightened. She had lived a very long time--never established Moya's age--and in all that time nothing had hurt her this badly. She cut even the weak thrust of her station-keeping fields; she couldn't sustain it. Moya hoped that if she just stayed still for a while, everything would settle down and she'd be able to continue.
Then pain lanced through her flank, rolled along her nerve endings, and exploded in her brain. Something was wrong. Very, very wrong.
* * *
Inside Moya, John Crichton hummed tunelessly as he flossed. The dentics Zhaan had given him felt and tasted disgusting as they crawled over his palate, but he couldn't deny that they did their job. The toothache he had been suffering from recently was at last beginning to calm down as the little creatures ingested the infected flesh.
Inside his mouth the dentic shuddered and ceased moving. Crichton stopped humming, reached into his mouth and peeled the dentic from his lower palate. It was a shame that the dentics had to die. But consuming infection was what they were bred for.
He deposited this, his ninth dead dentic this week, into the biomatter recycler in his quarters, took a long gulp of water and gargled. He would have preferred a shot of decent malt whisky, but anything would do. Anything to take away the taste of dead dentic.
It was now nearly seven months since Crichton had first set foot aboard Moya. And he found it difficult to believe that it was indeed barely half a year since the wormhole had opened in high Earth orbit and blasted him across time and space to who-knew-what part of the universe.
He missed his family and friends. But now he had new friends and, in place of his father, he had Moya. And he liked his new friends, liked them much more than he had once thought possible. Of course, he'd never admit it--after all, that would blow his cool completely--but there were times when he found himself actually having fun on this madcap ride through the galaxy. And he was learning, too. He was a scientist, an astronaut, and he had been presented with a tremendous adventure and a great opportunity. He had left the world of his birth and he had encountered new life. And he was the first human to do it.
Crichton closed the zipper on his jumpsuit and pulled on his boots. They were handmade, crafted for durability and guaranteed for a lifetime, but the tread was already half gone. The boots were made for space flight, not walking. And certainly not for adventuring on the number of planets that he had visited over the past months.
He knew that if he told his story back home on Earth, he would be ranked alongside Marco Polo and Robert Falcon Scott. Though they were separated by centuries, he felt a deep affinity with such men. For the journeys and perils faced by those great explorers--along the silk road and across the ice of the Antarctic--though bold adventures in their own time, were merely the first nervous steps on the journey he'd undertaken. Polo and Scott had gone to the ends of the Earth. Crichton had stepped beyond it.
If he was honest, Crichton had no problem with the image of himself as an adventurer. But the truth was that, as an adventurer, he was more Robinson Crusoe than Christopher Columbus. And it was a very strange beach indeed that he had been washed up on. There may have been no Man Friday, but there was a strange and enigmatic priest, a fearsome warrior who had been framed for murder, an opportunistic, thrill-seeking thief, a deposed ruler of billions, and an undeniably attractive Peacekeeper who had been exiled by her own people.
And they were all at large in a galaxy none of them could call home, travelling in a self-aware, organic spacecraft big enough to flatten Manhattan if she chose to land on it.
The universe regarded them as curios.
The Peacekeepers hunted them as criminals.
Crichton now called them friends. Just.
He took an extraordinary joy in the wonders and terrors he had seen and lived through during these last seven months, but there were days when being the only human on a living starship the size of Manhattan could really suck. Today was one such day. He knew that if the queen of Spain were to pay him a bounty for the discovery of new worlds, he'd be the richest man alive. But he'd still have a toothache.
Crichton sighed as he cracked the seal on a new pod, extracted the incubating dentic and attached it carefully to the inside of his mouth. Clothing secure, beard dealt with and toothache under control, if not actually cleared up, he left his bedroom and entered the chamber that he called his lounge. He looked around.
The floor and walls were made of a rubbery skin-like material, threaded with veins and pulsing with life. Skinsteel gratings emerged from the floor and furniture grew from the walls. Moya had been bred for functionality, but not necessarily a human aesthetic. The floor pulsed, deep blue and red, the healthy colors of oxygen transportation.
Crichton moved to his mantelpiece--well, the shelf Moya had grown when trying to fulfil his specifications for the room. Having a mantelpiece in a living spaceship might have seemed a pretension on any other day…but not today. Crichton ran his fingers lightly across the shelf, picked up the framed photograph.
"Hi, Dad." His voice held a hint of sadness.
The photograph came from his module, Farscape I, the experimental vehicle he had been piloting when he tore through a wormhole. His personal payload. Something that he was very glad he had brought along. Now he was surprised at how foreign the plastic of the frame felt to his fingers. Too other world. Too…human.
And his father's face, so much like his own--the strong brow, the clear eyes and alert, inquisitive expression. It seemed unfamiliar now … the face, almost, of a stranger.
How fast they fade, he thought to himself. How quickly we adapt.
Feeling that confronting his sadness was the best way to banish it, Crichton took his MiniDisc recorder from his pocket and checked the remaining recording time on the disc. Thirty seconds. He sighed. There went the last thirty seconds of ZZ Top's Afterburner.
Crichton finalized the disc, punched in the final chapter. His own voice filled the room. "Hey, Dad. Your favorite son here with another exciting instalment of Starman Jones. This week's episode is the one where our hero lands on a war-torn planet and ends up leading the downtrodden rebels in a futile but heroic fight against the oppressive state. On the way he learns about himself and comes out a better man." Crichton hit pause and sighed. How close had he come to erasing every entry he had ever made? How many times had he wondered at the futility of these silly messages to a man he would in all likelihood never see again?
Lacking an answer he elected to listen to the rest of the entry. Get it out of his system once and for all. His thumb shifted again and he heard himself say, "Dad, you know what? In many ways, space isn't that different from home. I've been here for a few months, and guess what? Conflicts. War. Class struggles. Discrimination. There's smuggling and slavery and drugs--all patrolled by a shoot first, ask questions later intergalactic police force called Peacekeepers."
The taped voice went on. "Anyway, I bet you can guess that I'm feeling a little down. Low, even. You know, I've been thinking about a gift … and, well, last month we visited a planet. Uyani Prime. Horrible place. Mostly coal. Black seas. No industrialization. Coal went out of fashion here a long time ago. But Moya needed to eat. Compressed carbon is a delicacy to her, so the crew let her feed on as much coal as she could handle. And can she pack it away! Still, what do you expect from a living starship that's about the size of Manhattan? Anyway, I got to stretch my legs, explore the coast a bit." There was a pause. Crichton's voice grew hushed with excitement. "I found a fossil, Dad. You've got to see this thing. It's beautiful. Perfectly preserved. Something like an ammonite but with arms. I can see hints of skin. The detail is incredible. I've got it here in the ship. I had to leave it in the cargo bay. It's a bit big. Actually, it's six and a half meters wide. Took all six of us here to get it aboard. The thing must weigh a quarter of a ton. Aeryn nearly lost an arm. It must be a billion years old." Crichton paused, then heard himself wonder aloud, "I wonder what race it evolved into? What heights they might have climbed? What goals they might have achieved? Where they are now? It's only now, out here on the edge of the infinite, that I'm really beginning to realize what we have back home. All I had … and all I lost." Another pause. "Dad, I guess we both know you may never see this beautiful example of life from another world. I just wanted you to know I was thinking of you on your--birthday. Happy birthday, Dad."
Crichton clicked off the recorder. Pulling a small wallet from another pocket he riffled through the stack of discs contained within. Rock. Jazz. Garage. Hardhouse. His last link with Earth. Music he might never hear again. Erasing these recordings was a sacrifice.
Talking to Dad was worth it.
Selecting Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A., Crichton loaded the disc and hit format, then record.
"Hey, Dad, your ever-lovin' blue-eyed son here. And this week our hero's got ...
