SCIFI.COM | Farscape: Journey Logs

Stark called Valldon "a world where the dead speak." Though I have never believed such things, I asked Stark, Crais, and Rygel to leave me there. I should have expected they'd ignore my wishes. But I couldn't face returning to Moya and seeing the other Crichton: the one still living; the one not mine.

I found a room at a filthy, overcrowded dump of a hotel. Outside, refugees, criminal-types and the drek of dozens of worlds milled about, all disreputable, many looking half-dead. A man there said he could contact my long-dead father, Talyn Lyczak. I consented to meet him. I was drunk, careless, remembering John, imagining that he was with me.

When the man I'd been expecting came to my room, he didn't claim he could summon the spirit of my father. He claimed that he was my father. He confirmed that Xhalax, my mother, had been ordered to kill him after my birth. Instead, he'd gone into hiding, with a surgically altered appearance.

With his PK blood spectrometer, we compared our genetic traits. It indicated a match.

At this same time, Stark and Rygel were searching for me. Stark was distracted, thinking he could hear Zhaan calling him. He got a further shock when he saw, or thought he saw, my mother in a crowd. We had left her for dead on the jungle planet (see "Relativity") — I thought Crais had shot her — but Crais (later) admitted he'd spared her on one condition: that she report our deaths to the Peacekeepers, saving us from more attacks by successive Retrieval Squads.

The man claiming to be Talyn had been telling me about his past. Now he urged me to speak of my own life. I didn't want to discuss it, but he realized I'd lost someone I loved. He even said that he knew of a being, a seer, who could contact John's spirit.

After Talyn left to find this seer, I interrogated the hotel's owner, hoping to discover if Talyn Lyczak was who he claimed to be, but I learned nothing. So I purchased another 10 bottles of fellip nectar (it goes quickly) and returned to my room.

When Crais and Stark arrived at my room I would not let them in. They warned me they had seen my mother, but their concern disgusted me. Both of them believe (or hope) that I need their care, and both would like to give it with as much physical contact as possible.

I forced them to leave, then walked onto the window ledge, 96 floors up. Perhaps it was reckless of me, but above the city I felt strangely calm and comforted.

As I contemplated the depths below me, Rygel (yet another would-be rescuer) flew up in his levitating chair. He was concerned I would jump and tried to convince me not to take my life; he spoke to me with a surprising fondness for a lost love named Kellor. I gave him no overt indication of my internal state, but his concern touched me. I left the ledge and stepped back down into the room. But I shut the Dominar out, just as I had kept Crais and Stark on the other side of a locked door.

By this time, Talyn Lyczak had returned, bearing a small seer named Cresus. Cresus insisted I tell him about Crichton, and I tried. Then an image of John appeared, begging me to help him, find him, bring him back. Talyn Lyczak insisted the vision was true, and that there was a chance we could make John's spirit corporeal again. Then he departed on some errand.

Alone, I imagined John telling me I'd just witnessed a fraud. How could I have known which was true? The Crichton Cresus showed me or the one I showed myself? Neither might have been real, or both.

I lost all doubt that Xhalax was real, however, when she broke into my room, alive and vengeful. She blamed me for the misery in her life and wanted me to suffer in return. She threatened my life. When Talyn Lyczak reappeared, he pleaded with her to show me mercy. Xhalax, cold and unyielding, turned the gun toward him. Seconds earlier he had been pleading for my life; now he was begging for his own. He did not plead long. Xhalax shot him. Then she turned back toward me.

In a world crowded by the living and the dead, I was suddenly faced with the very real possilibilty that the woman who gave me my life was about to end it....