Originally posted 4/21/07Well, I came up with this challenge at Terra Firma (write a fic with a character we know and an item from Earth), so I guess it behooves me to write something for it, eh? I was actually envisioning these stories being more humorous than straight, but, who's surprised to hear mine's not particularly funny?
Rating: G
Setting: About three cycles after PKW
Spoilers: Through PKW
Disclaimer: I don't own these wonderful characters or this fantastic universe, and I'm eternally grateful to the people who do for letting us play in their sandbox!
Many thanks to the usual betas, Imloco2, Shipsister, and MadScientist, for the encouragement and a little tidying up. And many thanks, as well, to everyone who took part in my threads at TF on movies with chess, and that unprincipled Furlow....you helped, too!
(Thanks to Loco also for the nifty picture at the end! You rock, jirl!)
Without further ado....
Of Cabbages and Kings....
John Crichton made sure he had a good grip on his son’s booted feet where they dangled in front of his chest, then shrugged his shoulders, trying to ease the crick he was getting in his neck from letting the boy sit up where he had a good view of the commerce center. Aeryn had gotten it in her head that she needed to find a
very specific piece of hardware to upgrade her prowler. D’Argo, like any red-blooded three cycle old, was bored, bored, bored tagging along after her. Since John was equally bored, and Aeryn had been getting more and more annoyed with them both, the men folk had struck out on their own about half an arn before.
Unfortunately, this particular commerce center didn’t offer a lot in the way of amusement. It was more like a flea market than a shopping mall, and an awful lot of what was for sale was, to John’s eye, junk. Still, D seemed to enjoy being up on his old man’s shoulders, which made him taller than even most of the aliens around, and at least John was getting the chance to stretch his legs.
His musing was interrupted by a loud shriek of excitement from his boy. “Look, Daddy! Chess! Look!”
Feeling fortunate that D hadn’t shouted into his ear, John tried to figure out what had gotten the boy so excited. “What do you see, sport?”
“Chess!” D’Argo insisted. “There! On that table!
Look, Daddy! Chess!”
John had no doubt that the boy
meant chess. Not that D’Argo played the game, of course, he was only three. But he’d seen his parents play on those occasions John could talk Aeryn into it, and he loved to sort out the pieces and line them up. Sometimes he even held play battles, one side against the other. But that couldn’t possibly be what he’d seen. D leaned solidly to the right, arm outstretched, and John turned that direction, wondering what in blazes his son was mistaking for a chess set here deep in the Uncharted Territories.
The table in question was cluttered with everything from kitchenware to electronic parts to dried stems of herbs and flowers, most of the latter sticking up out of brightly-colored jars. None of it remotely resembled a chess set to John’s eye, but to satisfy both his son and his curiosity, he dodged a few other customers and walked over to the booth. Once he was standing right in front of the table, he scanned the surface again, and his heart damn near stopped. There, in the center of the table, behind what were probably a couple of very large capacitors, was a chess set. An honest-to-God chess set very much like the one John’s grandfather had given him for his tenth birthday. What the frell?
“See!” D’Argo announced loudly, pointing down at the table. “Chess!”
“I see, buddy,” John agreed, barely able to speak. The flat board was wooden, with 64 alternating light and dark squares, and a passel of carved wooden pieces in the same light and dark colors were scattered haphazardly across it. They weren’t lined up to begin a game, nor did they appear to be in play. John’s fingers were itching to examine them more closely, and it seemed D’Argo, too, wanted to see the set up close and personal. He lifted the boy up over his head and set him on the ground in front of the table with a stern admonition to stand still.
The seller – some brand of non-Sebacean John hadn’t seen before – was busy with another customer, and John hoped he, she or it would stay that way for a bit so he could examine the set in relative privacy. Heart pounding, he moved the hardware aside so that D could see what he was doing, then crouched down so his eyes were level with the shiny game pieces. Now that he had the chance, he was almost afraid to reach out and touch a king or a pawn or a rook – that’s what his eyes told him they were – in case they should vanish.
D had no such inhibitions, and reached his hand towards the board. “That’s a king!” he said gleefully.
John intercepted the boy’s questing fingers before they touched the board, and picked up the black king himself. He closed his eyes for a moment and felt the well-remembered shape in the warm wood, so different from the set he’d improvised from metal and plastic when he’d first arrived here – what, seven cycles ago? Eight? He’d been desperate back then for any little piece of home. And now this, this bit of Earth had turned up in the far end of the universe.
How? How the frell had it gotten here? “Daddy, let
me see!” D tried to pry his father’s hand open to get at the chess piece.
The touch of his son’s hand on his pulled John back to the here and now. He started to give the king to D’Argo to look at, but then he looked at it again and decided it might be a bit fragile to hand over to a preschooler. After all, they didn’t even own it. But they
would own it before he left this planet, he realized, no matter how much it cost....
Thoughts whirling, he tried to focus his main attention on D’Argo to give himself time to calm down. “Here,” he said, grabbing one of the light-colored pieces. “What’s this one? Can you guess?”
D examined the horse’s head that made up the top of the figure and announced, “That’s a knight! Just like in deep ‘n dance day!”
What the frell? They’d just slipped into the Twilight Zone of kidspeak, which on top of the shock of finding this little piece of home was just not jelling in John’s brain. “What?”
“In the movie! When the man is playing chess outside!”
In deep in dance. In deep en dance. In deepen dance. Independence! “Independence Day!” John exclaimed when the light finally dawned. Chess “outside” – being played on a chess table in a park! They’d talked about it one day, compared the pieces on the TV with the set John had made. That explained how D’Argo had recognized this very different chess set for what it was.
As D’Argo giggled, pleased that his dunce of a father had finally figured it out, a shadow fell across them. John looked up to see Aeryn approaching, a satisfied expression on her face. Presumably she’d found the part she was looking for.
“Find something interesting?” she asked casually as John stood up.
D’Argo held out the knight that was still in his hand. “Chess!”
Aeryn took the piece from D’Argo, but her eyes swiveled to John. “Chess?” she asked, guardedly, though she’d surely seen a set just like this at his father’s house on Earth. “You’re sure?”
Her reaction brought John back to the reality he’d been trying not to think about – that this thing
shouldn’t be here. His stomach tightened, and he chewed on his lower lip, but he nodded. “Yeah, it’s a chess set, babe.” How it had gotten here, he had no idea. Earth was a gazillion miles away, and he’d destroyed the only wormhole that led directly to the planet almost four cycles ago.
They were still staring at each other when the seller at last appeared. In a low, gravelly voice he asked, “Can I help you?”
After one last look in John’s eyes, Aeryn handed him the chess piece she’d taken from their son. “I’ll take D’Argo to get a treat. Meet us in the refreshment pavilion when you’re done.”
John nodded his gratitude and turned his attention to the seller, a furry hulk who towered over him.
Don’t look too eager, John admonished himself. Who was he kidding? He’d been standing here
how long gawking at this? With a grimace he was only partly successful in suppressing, John pointed towards the little piece of home. “Mind if I look a little closer?”
The seller opened his eyes widely, which apparently meant go ahead, and John took a deep breath and picked up the whole board, peering underneath to see if there was any kind of manufacturer’s mark. There wasn’t anything obvious, so he set it back down and picked up a few pieces, fingering the soft felt on the bottom. He had a sneaking suspicion they were hand-carved, though there wasn’t much variation in the design, and they were carefully sanded and varnished. Whoever’d made ‘em had been well-practiced. Sucking in his lower lip, he began arranging the pieces in their appropriate squares on their starting ranks – king and queen in the center, bishops, knights and then rooks flanking them, and a whole lineup of pawns in front of their betters. To his dismay, he saw that one of the short, stubby pawns was missing. But that was only a minor disappointment; this remarkable find called to him in a way nothing – well, excepting his family – had done since he’d arrived in this place.
Breaking in on his thoughts, the seller said, “You know what this is?”
“It’s a game. A pastime. From my homeworld,” he added, because he didn’t see what harm it could do. The fellow would just assume he was talking about a Sebacean breakaway colony.
The seller nodded as if John had passed some kind of test. He cleared his throat and ventured, “It’s lovely workmanship.”
“It is,” John agreed, thinking it was time to get down to business. “But it’s incomplete.”
The two men stared at each other, each taking the measure of his opponent. And then John thought, Frell this! I know I want it, and he knows I want it, and the actual chess set is only the preliminary anyway. “Look, let’s assume I’ve thrown out a low ball offer. You counter, way too high. I counter your counter offer, and you counter my
counter counter offer. We do this dance a couple three times, and then we meet in the middle.”
The seller stared at him, bemused. “What?”
John grinned. “Name a fair price. I’ll pay it.”
The seller grinned back, and named a price actually much lower than John had been prepared to pay. John nodded sharply and dug into his pocket for a handful of credits. Transaction concluded, the seller began to wrap the set up, enfolding each piece individually in a scrap of paper.
John watched, nearly hypnotized, as tiny pieces of wood from a little blue planet on the other side of the galaxy vanished from view into a carrysack. He kicked the ground once or twice and then let his words out in a rush. “So, where’d you get this thing, anyway?”
The man paused in his wrapping and gave John another piercing stare.
Irritated, John added, “We both know it’s a hell of a long way from home and it sure didn’t walk here on its own.”
There’d almost certainly been a wormhole involved.The seller shrugged, and then let out something that might have been a chuckle. “I got it from a Sebacean woman, about half a cycle ago. She looked Sebacean to me, anyway.”
Wormholes and a Sebacean woman? A chill ran up his spine.
Oh, frell. It couldn’t be.... “About yea tall?” he asked, holding his hand out a little below his chin. “Really, um, large?” he added, wincing as he spread his arms wide.
But the man was already shaking his head. He clicked his tongue and said, “Rather taller than that, and definitely not...large. About the size of your mate.” With a glance in the direction Aeryn had left with D’Argo before they’d started dickering, he added, “Her hair was very different though. Much lighter, almost white, and very short.”
Listening to the description, John muffled a sigh of profound relief. True, a person could diet, and change her hair, but, she couldn’t change her height. Taken as a whole it added up to a stranger, thank God. He’d hate to think that frelling Furlow had found a way to Earth. She could cause almost as much trouble as the Scarrans! On the other hand, at least he
knew Furlow. He would have had a leg up searching for
her. The unprincipled mechanic and wormhole tech extraordinaire probably had a rap sheet in at least half the planetary data bases Pilot could access. “This...Sebacean...woman. Did she have a name?” he asked, without much hope. The man shook his head, and John added, “Why’d she sell you the chess set?”
“Why does anyone sell anything? She needed the money.”
“Of course she did,” he muttered. A thought struck him suddenly and he glanced around at the table. Nothing else looked remotely Earth-like. “She didn’t happen to sell you anything else, did she?” The seller shook his head. Frustrated in spite of himself, John persisted in his questioning. “I don’t suppose she said where she was from? Where she was going from here?”
No, of course she hadn’t. John accepted the answer gracefully; what else could he do, unless he was prepared to get out the thumbscrews and pliers? He took the package containing the precious chess set, and headed off to find Aeryn and D’Argo.
As he walked, he hefted the package and toted up what he knew. About half a cycle ago, a Sebacean woman had been through this part of the UTs – or maybe, a little voice in the back of his head whispered, she’d actually been
human. In any case, she’d carried with her an artifact undeniably from Earth. Had she visited Earth herself? Had she met up with someone who had? Had someone else from Earth managed to find a way here, bringing the chess set along? Was
she from Earth?
Earth....the very name suddenly tied his stomach up in knots.
Earth!Without having been aware of the trip, he found himself standing in the doorway of the refreshment pavilion, scanning the room for his wife and child. There they were, seated against the opposite wall a few motras away. He stood and watched them for a microt. D’Argo was talking up a storm, evidence of some dark-colored, messy treat smeared around his mouth. From the expression on her face, Aeryn was somewhere far away. She turned abruptly, eyes seeking the door. There was a small frown on her face. When she saw him in the doorway, she sucked in her lower lip, which only accentuated the frown. John flashed her a reassuring smile, hoping that would hold her while he got control of his thoughts.
His heart was pounding and his chest was tight, because he knew he was about to embark on a fool’s errand, another obsessive quest. He’d told himself for more than three cycles that Earth was lost to him. He’d told himself he never wanted to see another goddamn wormhole as long as he lived, after the horrifying events at Qujaga. But standing here clutching a carved wooden chess set to his chest, he knew,
knew without a doubt, that he was going to find this mystery woman, the one who’d sold a little piece of Earth to a flea market dealer on this backwater planet. He was going to find out how she was connected to the planet of his birth. And failing that, he was going to dig out his old research notebooks, the ones he’d stuffed in a storage container and hidden away in the most remote of Moya’s tiers, and he was going to pour over them again, looking for a way to go
home.... Not for good, no, no, not for good. He’d learned the hard way that Earth and John Crichton were a bad fit now.
Having gotten that much straight in his head, he walked across the room and sat down next to Aeryn, leaning over and kissing her as he did so.
She looked at him with concern. “Is that it?” she asked, as he placed the package on the table.
He was quite sure she knew exactly what this innocent package was going to do to their lives. “Uh-huh,” he acknowledged.
D’Argo squealed, “You got the chess?”
John couldn’t help smiling at the excitement on his son’s face. “Yep! You did real good finding it, D! We’ll take it for a spin when we get back up to Moya.” D’Argo reached for the package, but John shook his head. “Finish your – what is that, anyway? Rutger berries? Well, finish ‘em up, son, so we can go.”
While D shoveled sweetened fruit into his mouth as fast as he could, John looked at Aeryn again, and saw, to his relief, that she was smiling. A little wistfully, to be sure, but smiling.
No, he had no intention of going home for good. That wasn’t what this was about. Their home was here, in the UTs. But Earth was the place he’d come from. It was out there. It was real. And their little munchkin deserved a chance to see more of his people and the place they came from than a solitary chess set that was missing a pawn, however heart-stoppingly beautiful that chess set was. D’Argo Sun-Crichton deserved not only pawns, but shoes, and ships, and sealing wax, and cabbages and kings – and his daddy was going to get them for him, by hook or by crook....
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