“What happened?” River said, obligingly.
“Well, the short version is that bad men blew up the parasol and Shadow wasn’t a place people could live any more.”
Mal wondered, briefly, how it would have been different if the Shadow Volunteers had succeeded in preventing the explosion. Would there have been a war? Would Mal himself have stayed on Shadow, married Eleanor, raised a passel of kids? Or would he be here, now, on Serenity, no matter what had happened?
“Be here now.” River said. And it brought him back to himself.
“I was wool-gathering,” he admitted. “Well, let me tell you the longer version. Here’s how it was:”
"The parasol is what made Shadow livable, but it's also what made land and energy on Shadow so cheap. I told you some people didn’t feel safe with a big lens of aluminized film four times the size of the planet over their heads, and because they didn’t feel safe the land ended up being pretty cheap. Meanwhile, that same worrisome parasol was a great source of solar power.”
“Once the parasol was in place and the terraforming was finishing up, then the corporation behind the whole operation opened up the place to settlers, and Mama was one of the first and the few in line.”
"You could get a lot of land on Shadow when you were one of maybe a few dozen who were asking for it. It was a buyers market. Mama got as much land as she could and then she started raising cattle. It's what she knew how to do.”
"And she did well. She kept buying land with the proceeds as long as it was cheap. And the longer the parasol was in place and the terraforming held then the more the land was worth. I think she owned some kind of actual percentage of Shadow before the sea stabilized and the price for land went up too high for her to afford anymore. And her one-percent or so was about the best there was. High ground, but not far from the shore of the Freshwater sea.”
"You can run a lot of cattle on a hundredth of even a small planet and not come close to hitting your limits. So she was doing well. She was doing so well she decided she could take a break and try raising a boy, too.”
"At least, that's the way she always told me the story. To hear her tell it I couldn't have come along at a better time. She had good ranch-hands she trusted to take over some of the work while she raised me and schooled me.”
"When everybody started talking about Unification she was conflicted, and maybe kind of in favor. I think it was just so she could get me signed on to the Allied Planets' Cortex. It was going to be part of my schooling, but the Cortex was also how the Alliance bound the planets together. If a planet was in the Alliance then it could get onto the Cortex. If a planet was Independent then it was on its own, and the Cortex and everything that came with it would be withheld."
"I think she might have voted for Alliance if she ever had the chance. Schooling was real important to Mama. She even tried to tell me that it was more important than my other chores. I was the one who had to convince her that the ranch-hands wouldn't respect me if I put my schooling first.”
"Not sure I ever convinced her, really. She still made me do my schooling, but she allowed as how I could do my chores when it was daylight. It's not like we didn't have power for night-lights to study by.”
"I learned plenty, though, during the days on Shadow.”
”I learned to fight with the ranch-hands' boys. I learned a thing or two from the ranch-hands' girls, too.” Especially Eleanor, he thought to himself. Mal recollected that some of the fights with the fellows had actually been about Eleanor, actually, now that he thought about it.
"From the hands themselves I learned the things one needs to know to discourage rustlers - from knowing how to ride so that I could patrol the fences, to knowing how to shoot a gun and hit your target. It was things a man needed to know, and the Cortex couldn’t teach them to me.”
"I did my schooling at night, though.”
"Day or night – I learned from Mama. I learned to bargain. She bargained hard when she bought or sold cattle or land. And she bargained hard when she bought anything we couldn't make for ourselves. And she bargained hard when she hired on a new hand. I watched her get the best people by paying them with more than money. She gave them a little land, sometimes. Or a little help. Or a little respect.”
"She couldn't give them much money, truth be told. Not that she didn't pay a fair wage. But a fair wage isn't much when you're up against other ranchers with a lot of cheap cattlehands who're working off their indenture.”
"Our hands did good work, though, and we prospered. And word got around that Mama would treat you fair. The best hands came to us when their indenture was done, and our neighbors had to treat their workers a little better, will they or nil they.”
"And Mama spoke for all of her hands – not just for herself – in the Landowners' Council. Landowners were who the Alliance recognized as having authority. So we gave the Alliance a group of landowners to talk to about whether or not we wanted to join up with them. Still, Mama made sure to listen to every voice on her ranch, and to speak for every voice as best she could.”
"She sure did want that Cortex for me, though. I think she knew that life on Shadow wouldn't last, or at least wouldn't always be so easy. She wanted to see me take the family fortune off-planet and make something of myself.”
"I thought I might do it, too, if I could stand to leave.” If I could take Eleanor with me, maybe.
"Mama wasn’t really in favor of me joining the Shadow Volunteers, but she didn't argue effectively against it.” The same could be said for Eleanor, on both counts. “And it looked like a job that needed doing. I'd been taught to see to it that important jobs got done, and to learn how to do them myself.”
"So I went out into the black.”
"Not far out, mind you. Just to one of the polar-orbit mirror stations that doubled as our training post and guard-station. But that was far enough to learn some things Mama and the hands couldn't teach me. I learned some of the basics of the black, and the schooling Mama made me do came in handy. Those [lengthy chinese] differential equations are important to orbital motion, it turns out. You can't move between worlds without lots of math. The computers do most of the work, but you ought to understand the basics. That's what my flight instructor said, anyway. And I do. Mostly. Kind of.”
"I did okay. Still, I was better with a gun than I was with a helmsman's wheel.”
“Also it turns out that I'd learned some other things from Mama and the ranch-hands: How to lead, and how to work with what you got.”
"Like I said, I did okay. I made corporal pretty quick.”
"The brass was talking about stationing some of us on the parasol, itself, to keep it safe. It had kind of a station around the center, built around where the tube for the fake sun was. The tube was the only point to having a station there, actually. The ‘sun’ required some ongoing intervention – more filtering of the sunlight, or less, depending on conditions – and it was all taken care of by a computer. But they’d built a sun-station so that people could take its management over if need be. It was smack in the center of the outside of the parasol, and the brightness of the fake sun kept the station from being visible to folk on the inside.”
“It was unmanned most of the time. And it wasn’t built for a bunch of guards to occupy, anyway.”
“The Alliance rhetoric from the core planets had been cranked up a notch, though, and we knew where the weak-point in our argument was. It was an Allied-planet corporation that had built the parasol, and there was talk of them trying to take it back and charge Shadow for its use. They were going to raise the price of solar power, for sure, if we weren’t going to be an Alliance world. The cortex wasn’t the only thing they could withhold from us.”
“So we were trying to figure out how to occupy the station for our own protection when we found out that someone had beaten us to it.”
"The SCA. The Shadow Citizens for Alliance. They took possession before the Volunteers had a full squad there, and then they issued their proclamation that Pro-Alliance folks had the parasol, and were keeping it, and therefore Shadow was a member of the Allied Planets whether we liked it or not.”
"And they had a bomb. They demanded the Landowner’s Council recognize the authority of the Alliance or they’d blow up the parasol. They held that threat over all our heads. Literally.”
"Well, the Allied Planets didn't recognize the SCA's authority in the matter and Parliament denounced them as violent extremists. The King of Londinium issued a statement supporting Unification for Shadow, but calling for a planet-wide referendum to confirm it. Violence was not the way, he said. Threatening to destroy the parasol was crazy, he said.”
"I gotta say, Parliament and their King always know how to spin the words to spin the worlds.”
"And he was right. It was crazy. The SCA were Shadow folk with families and friends below them. There was no way they were going to destroy the parasol.”
“The Landowner’s Council didn’t mind putting the matter to a vote, but they also didn’t like being threatened into it. So they hatched a plan to take the sun-station back and get rid of the bomb.”
“It was a good plan, I think. Some of us were in a troop transport on slow approach to the station. Our stated purpose was to negotiate with the SCA and then occupy the station upon successful negotiation.”
“Really we were a distraction. Our job was to keep the occupiers occupied while a commando force snuck into the station and took control by force.”
“How does a commando force sneak up on a station when that station is the only feature on the outside of a smooth, bright, gold, convex lens? Very carefully. And with camouflage.”
“We had three of our best guys laying flat, in spacesuits, on this contraption we’d rigged up to hug the surface of the parasol as close as it could. It had to move fast, just because of the distance it had to go. And it had a parasol of its own.”
“It sounds like it shouldn’t work, but the parasol is so bright from the outside that neither we nor they could keep watch of it properly. As long as our contraption was just as bright then it wouldn’t stand out.”
“It was a good plan, and I think it would have worked if we’d really understood what we were up against. I don’t think we ever thought they were serious about blowing up the parasol and destroying a whole world.”
”I didn't know then what I know now. Now I know you shouldn't ever underestimate crazy.”
”Turned out the SCA was serious. Turned out it was one of those use-it-or-lose-it situations and they were about to lose control of that bomb and the parasol to us.”
“And did I mention they were crazy?”
Or maybe they were following orders, Mal thought to himself.
River met his eyes. Mal wondered if she knew the truth of the matter, but she didn’t move. At all. There was no indication whether he should ask the question that was on his mind or leave well enough alone.
He closed his eyes and sighed out a breath. It was over and done and the Alliance had problems enough of its own these days – and Mal and River both had plenty to do with that – so there was no point in making more over something that had happened about the same time that before a fateful recording had been made on Miranda…
”They were crazy,” he said, trying to believe it. “Or maybe they didn’t even mean for it to happen. I was looking over my commanding officer’s shoulder as he was talking to the head nutcase in the station. We’d kept the SCA distracted and occupied while our commando squad was on approach. We knew it was going to happen any second. We were in the process of explaining, for the umpteenth time, that the Landowner’s Council was willing to vote on Alliance, but not under threat and that if the SCA would please leave the station for us to occupy then we would allow them to go to Londinium or Sihnon or Ariel or wherever they’d like but that if they returned to Shadow then we’d have no choice but to arrest them. That seemed to be a sticking point with them. Shadow was their home too, after all.”
“Anyway, my CO is jawing at this guy and he’s jawing right back when there’s a commotion on the other end and his eyes get all wide and he says “What have you d-?”
“And then he was gone. To this day I don’t know exactly what happened. But he was gone and the station was gone and the center of the parasol was gone and just about everything about LaGrange points and counter-balance ceased to apply to the parasol.”
”I mentioned the parasol was about 4 times as big as the planet of Shadow? Had to be because we were so close to the sun. Really, the parasol was the the sky of Shadow. On the dayside, anyway.”
”Well, that bomb poked a big hole in the sky. Unfiltered sunlight and radiation poured in from the other side. And the hole in the sky got bigger. And the sky fell apart without a center to hold it together.”
When it happened, though, all we could do was try to help evacuate the nightside. We got a few people off that rock, but not many. There just weren't enough ships.
”Ma was on the dayside when it happened. Ma and all the ranch-hands that had helped raise me – all my childhood friends who weren’t with me in that ship…” And Eleanor. I don’t know why I can’t even talk to you about Eleanor, he found himself thinking.
River had her hands in her lap and was staring at the floor.
The silence was oppressive. Mal ended it. “I tell myself it was quick for them.”
”The Parliament and the King issued their statements, denouncing the actions of the SCA. And they further stated that they would hate to see anything similar happen to any other terraformed world. They issued a resolution calling for Alliance control over terraforming infrastructure on every world spinning, for the protection of the citizenry from a disaster like like the one that befell the people of Shadow. And they sent out their ships and their soldiers to take control.”
”And Shadow, its freshwater sea turned to steam, stood there as a silent warning of what could happen. The most extreme case of terraforming failure, ever.”
”A lot of worlds voted for Unification after Shadow. Beaumonde, Bellerophon, Bernadette, Boros, Osiris, Persephone...”
”A lot didn't, though. Athens and her moons were united against Unification as were Constance, Du-Khang, Ezra, Greenleaf, Hera, Jiangyin, Lilac, New Kashmir, New Melbourne, Paquin, St Albans...”
”You'd think with so many worlds on our side we couldn't lose. You'd think with little things like freedom and the right to self-determination on our side we couldn't lose...”
”I still had a lot to learn, it turns out. And it took a whole war for me to learn it.”
”We had more worlds but they had more troops to fill the worlds we had. We knew we were in the right, but they thought they were in the right, too. A lot of those folks were sure they were doing the right thing. A Unified Humanity sounded pretty good to them. A Unified Humanity and No More Shadows. I think that I heard that in a speech, once.”
”And so they won. They had the numbers and they had the rhetoric. We just wanted to be left alone.”
Mall stopped. He realized he’d gotten off track with his story. This wasn’t supposed to be a war story. It was supposed to be a story about home and family.
“So yeah,” he said. “They took my home and they took my family and left me floating in the black. It took me a long time to settle on a new home and a new family after that.”
“At first my family was the other fellows on that transport. We got out of the core, around all the Alliance vessels and patrols, and we signed up with the Independents just in time for serious hostilities to start.”
“I think I’m the only one of those fellows who survived the war.”
“I’d told myself that when the war was over I’d make a home on some Independent world and start over, maybe start a family.”
“But by the time the world was over there were no Independent worlds, and I didn’t want a family. I never meant to make one for myself.”
River spoke for the first time in a long time. “You didn’t.”
“I didn’t want a family or I didn’t make a family?”
“Either. Neither. Both.” She was giving him the how-dumb-can-you-be look that she usually reserved for Simon. Eventually she gave up and explained Mal’s own life to him. “You weren’t trying to make a family. You were trying to make a crew.”
“So we’re not a family? We’re a crew?”
She kept giving him that look. Finally: “Zoe did it. Not you. And over your objections. Zoe started making your crew into a family when she married Wash. Then you hired Kaylee and you made her your little sister. Later you let me and Simon stay and now Simon’s with Kaylee, so that makes him something like your brother now, which makes me your little sister, too!” And she gave him a happy echo of that look she reserved for her brother. Or brothers.
“And Inara?” Mal immediately knew he shouldn’t have asked. He tried to cover. “And Jayne? What about Inara and Jayne, are they family, or crew?”
River looked like she was giving up completely on Mal. She started to get up and leave the bridge, but she turned on her way out and said simply “What Inara is, is up to you and Inara. What Jayne is, is up to Jayne.” She pressed her palm to the doorframe as she left Serenity’s bridge.
Mal was just beginning to ponder the subtleties of that, when he realized she was still talking to someone as she went down the stairs. “I think you’re ready for a family.”
Mal turned in the pilot’s chair to see who she was talking to, then got up and looked out the door and down, but there was nobody there he could see.
“Well, the short version is that bad men blew up the parasol and Shadow wasn’t a place people could live any more.”
Mal wondered, briefly, how it would have been different if the Shadow Volunteers had succeeded in preventing the explosion. Would there have been a war? Would Mal himself have stayed on Shadow, married Eleanor, raised a passel of kids? Or would he be here, now, on Serenity, no matter what had happened?
“Be here now.” River said. And it brought him back to himself.
“I was wool-gathering,” he admitted. “Well, let me tell you the longer version. Here’s how it was:”
"The parasol is what made Shadow livable, but it's also what made land and energy on Shadow so cheap. I told you some people didn’t feel safe with a big lens of aluminized film four times the size of the planet over their heads, and because they didn’t feel safe the land ended up being pretty cheap. Meanwhile, that same worrisome parasol was a great source of solar power.”
“Once the parasol was in place and the terraforming was finishing up, then the corporation behind the whole operation opened up the place to settlers, and Mama was one of the first and the few in line.”
"You could get a lot of land on Shadow when you were one of maybe a few dozen who were asking for it. It was a buyers market. Mama got as much land as she could and then she started raising cattle. It's what she knew how to do.”
"And she did well. She kept buying land with the proceeds as long as it was cheap. And the longer the parasol was in place and the terraforming held then the more the land was worth. I think she owned some kind of actual percentage of Shadow before the sea stabilized and the price for land went up too high for her to afford anymore. And her one-percent or so was about the best there was. High ground, but not far from the shore of the Freshwater sea.”
"You can run a lot of cattle on a hundredth of even a small planet and not come close to hitting your limits. So she was doing well. She was doing so well she decided she could take a break and try raising a boy, too.”
"At least, that's the way she always told me the story. To hear her tell it I couldn't have come along at a better time. She had good ranch-hands she trusted to take over some of the work while she raised me and schooled me.”
"When everybody started talking about Unification she was conflicted, and maybe kind of in favor. I think it was just so she could get me signed on to the Allied Planets' Cortex. It was going to be part of my schooling, but the Cortex was also how the Alliance bound the planets together. If a planet was in the Alliance then it could get onto the Cortex. If a planet was Independent then it was on its own, and the Cortex and everything that came with it would be withheld."
"I think she might have voted for Alliance if she ever had the chance. Schooling was real important to Mama. She even tried to tell me that it was more important than my other chores. I was the one who had to convince her that the ranch-hands wouldn't respect me if I put my schooling first.”
"Not sure I ever convinced her, really. She still made me do my schooling, but she allowed as how I could do my chores when it was daylight. It's not like we didn't have power for night-lights to study by.”
"I learned plenty, though, during the days on Shadow.”
”I learned to fight with the ranch-hands' boys. I learned a thing or two from the ranch-hands' girls, too.” Especially Eleanor, he thought to himself. Mal recollected that some of the fights with the fellows had actually been about Eleanor, actually, now that he thought about it.
"From the hands themselves I learned the things one needs to know to discourage rustlers - from knowing how to ride so that I could patrol the fences, to knowing how to shoot a gun and hit your target. It was things a man needed to know, and the Cortex couldn’t teach them to me.”
"I did my schooling at night, though.”
"Day or night – I learned from Mama. I learned to bargain. She bargained hard when she bought or sold cattle or land. And she bargained hard when she bought anything we couldn't make for ourselves. And she bargained hard when she hired on a new hand. I watched her get the best people by paying them with more than money. She gave them a little land, sometimes. Or a little help. Or a little respect.”
"She couldn't give them much money, truth be told. Not that she didn't pay a fair wage. But a fair wage isn't much when you're up against other ranchers with a lot of cheap cattlehands who're working off their indenture.”
"Our hands did good work, though, and we prospered. And word got around that Mama would treat you fair. The best hands came to us when their indenture was done, and our neighbors had to treat their workers a little better, will they or nil they.”
"And Mama spoke for all of her hands – not just for herself – in the Landowners' Council. Landowners were who the Alliance recognized as having authority. So we gave the Alliance a group of landowners to talk to about whether or not we wanted to join up with them. Still, Mama made sure to listen to every voice on her ranch, and to speak for every voice as best she could.”
"She sure did want that Cortex for me, though. I think she knew that life on Shadow wouldn't last, or at least wouldn't always be so easy. She wanted to see me take the family fortune off-planet and make something of myself.”
"I thought I might do it, too, if I could stand to leave.” If I could take Eleanor with me, maybe.
"Mama wasn’t really in favor of me joining the Shadow Volunteers, but she didn't argue effectively against it.” The same could be said for Eleanor, on both counts. “And it looked like a job that needed doing. I'd been taught to see to it that important jobs got done, and to learn how to do them myself.”
"So I went out into the black.”
"Not far out, mind you. Just to one of the polar-orbit mirror stations that doubled as our training post and guard-station. But that was far enough to learn some things Mama and the hands couldn't teach me. I learned some of the basics of the black, and the schooling Mama made me do came in handy. Those [lengthy chinese] differential equations are important to orbital motion, it turns out. You can't move between worlds without lots of math. The computers do most of the work, but you ought to understand the basics. That's what my flight instructor said, anyway. And I do. Mostly. Kind of.”
"I did okay. Still, I was better with a gun than I was with a helmsman's wheel.”
“Also it turns out that I'd learned some other things from Mama and the ranch-hands: How to lead, and how to work with what you got.”
"Like I said, I did okay. I made corporal pretty quick.”
"The brass was talking about stationing some of us on the parasol, itself, to keep it safe. It had kind of a station around the center, built around where the tube for the fake sun was. The tube was the only point to having a station there, actually. The ‘sun’ required some ongoing intervention – more filtering of the sunlight, or less, depending on conditions – and it was all taken care of by a computer. But they’d built a sun-station so that people could take its management over if need be. It was smack in the center of the outside of the parasol, and the brightness of the fake sun kept the station from being visible to folk on the inside.”
“It was unmanned most of the time. And it wasn’t built for a bunch of guards to occupy, anyway.”
“The Alliance rhetoric from the core planets had been cranked up a notch, though, and we knew where the weak-point in our argument was. It was an Allied-planet corporation that had built the parasol, and there was talk of them trying to take it back and charge Shadow for its use. They were going to raise the price of solar power, for sure, if we weren’t going to be an Alliance world. The cortex wasn’t the only thing they could withhold from us.”
“So we were trying to figure out how to occupy the station for our own protection when we found out that someone had beaten us to it.”
"The SCA. The Shadow Citizens for Alliance. They took possession before the Volunteers had a full squad there, and then they issued their proclamation that Pro-Alliance folks had the parasol, and were keeping it, and therefore Shadow was a member of the Allied Planets whether we liked it or not.”
"And they had a bomb. They demanded the Landowner’s Council recognize the authority of the Alliance or they’d blow up the parasol. They held that threat over all our heads. Literally.”
"Well, the Allied Planets didn't recognize the SCA's authority in the matter and Parliament denounced them as violent extremists. The King of Londinium issued a statement supporting Unification for Shadow, but calling for a planet-wide referendum to confirm it. Violence was not the way, he said. Threatening to destroy the parasol was crazy, he said.”
"I gotta say, Parliament and their King always know how to spin the words to spin the worlds.”
"And he was right. It was crazy. The SCA were Shadow folk with families and friends below them. There was no way they were going to destroy the parasol.”
“The Landowner’s Council didn’t mind putting the matter to a vote, but they also didn’t like being threatened into it. So they hatched a plan to take the sun-station back and get rid of the bomb.”
“It was a good plan, I think. Some of us were in a troop transport on slow approach to the station. Our stated purpose was to negotiate with the SCA and then occupy the station upon successful negotiation.”
“Really we were a distraction. Our job was to keep the occupiers occupied while a commando force snuck into the station and took control by force.”
“How does a commando force sneak up on a station when that station is the only feature on the outside of a smooth, bright, gold, convex lens? Very carefully. And with camouflage.”
“We had three of our best guys laying flat, in spacesuits, on this contraption we’d rigged up to hug the surface of the parasol as close as it could. It had to move fast, just because of the distance it had to go. And it had a parasol of its own.”
“It sounds like it shouldn’t work, but the parasol is so bright from the outside that neither we nor they could keep watch of it properly. As long as our contraption was just as bright then it wouldn’t stand out.”
“It was a good plan, and I think it would have worked if we’d really understood what we were up against. I don’t think we ever thought they were serious about blowing up the parasol and destroying a whole world.”
”I didn't know then what I know now. Now I know you shouldn't ever underestimate crazy.”
”Turned out the SCA was serious. Turned out it was one of those use-it-or-lose-it situations and they were about to lose control of that bomb and the parasol to us.”
“And did I mention they were crazy?”
Or maybe they were following orders, Mal thought to himself.
River met his eyes. Mal wondered if she knew the truth of the matter, but she didn’t move. At all. There was no indication whether he should ask the question that was on his mind or leave well enough alone.
He closed his eyes and sighed out a breath. It was over and done and the Alliance had problems enough of its own these days – and Mal and River both had plenty to do with that – so there was no point in making more over something that had happened about the same time that before a fateful recording had been made on Miranda…
”They were crazy,” he said, trying to believe it. “Or maybe they didn’t even mean for it to happen. I was looking over my commanding officer’s shoulder as he was talking to the head nutcase in the station. We’d kept the SCA distracted and occupied while our commando squad was on approach. We knew it was going to happen any second. We were in the process of explaining, for the umpteenth time, that the Landowner’s Council was willing to vote on Alliance, but not under threat and that if the SCA would please leave the station for us to occupy then we would allow them to go to Londinium or Sihnon or Ariel or wherever they’d like but that if they returned to Shadow then we’d have no choice but to arrest them. That seemed to be a sticking point with them. Shadow was their home too, after all.”
“Anyway, my CO is jawing at this guy and he’s jawing right back when there’s a commotion on the other end and his eyes get all wide and he says “What have you d-?”
“And then he was gone. To this day I don’t know exactly what happened. But he was gone and the station was gone and the center of the parasol was gone and just about everything about LaGrange points and counter-balance ceased to apply to the parasol.”
”I mentioned the parasol was about 4 times as big as the planet of Shadow? Had to be because we were so close to the sun. Really, the parasol was the the sky of Shadow. On the dayside, anyway.”
”Well, that bomb poked a big hole in the sky. Unfiltered sunlight and radiation poured in from the other side. And the hole in the sky got bigger. And the sky fell apart without a center to hold it together.”
When it happened, though, all we could do was try to help evacuate the nightside. We got a few people off that rock, but not many. There just weren't enough ships.
”Ma was on the dayside when it happened. Ma and all the ranch-hands that had helped raise me – all my childhood friends who weren’t with me in that ship…” And Eleanor. I don’t know why I can’t even talk to you about Eleanor, he found himself thinking.
River had her hands in her lap and was staring at the floor.
The silence was oppressive. Mal ended it. “I tell myself it was quick for them.”
”The Parliament and the King issued their statements, denouncing the actions of the SCA. And they further stated that they would hate to see anything similar happen to any other terraformed world. They issued a resolution calling for Alliance control over terraforming infrastructure on every world spinning, for the protection of the citizenry from a disaster like like the one that befell the people of Shadow. And they sent out their ships and their soldiers to take control.”
”And Shadow, its freshwater sea turned to steam, stood there as a silent warning of what could happen. The most extreme case of terraforming failure, ever.”
”A lot of worlds voted for Unification after Shadow. Beaumonde, Bellerophon, Bernadette, Boros, Osiris, Persephone...”
”A lot didn't, though. Athens and her moons were united against Unification as were Constance, Du-Khang, Ezra, Greenleaf, Hera, Jiangyin, Lilac, New Kashmir, New Melbourne, Paquin, St Albans...”
”You'd think with so many worlds on our side we couldn't lose. You'd think with little things like freedom and the right to self-determination on our side we couldn't lose...”
”I still had a lot to learn, it turns out. And it took a whole war for me to learn it.”
”We had more worlds but they had more troops to fill the worlds we had. We knew we were in the right, but they thought they were in the right, too. A lot of those folks were sure they were doing the right thing. A Unified Humanity sounded pretty good to them. A Unified Humanity and No More Shadows. I think that I heard that in a speech, once.”
”And so they won. They had the numbers and they had the rhetoric. We just wanted to be left alone.”
Mall stopped. He realized he’d gotten off track with his story. This wasn’t supposed to be a war story. It was supposed to be a story about home and family.
“So yeah,” he said. “They took my home and they took my family and left me floating in the black. It took me a long time to settle on a new home and a new family after that.”
“At first my family was the other fellows on that transport. We got out of the core, around all the Alliance vessels and patrols, and we signed up with the Independents just in time for serious hostilities to start.”
“I think I’m the only one of those fellows who survived the war.”
“I’d told myself that when the war was over I’d make a home on some Independent world and start over, maybe start a family.”
“But by the time the world was over there were no Independent worlds, and I didn’t want a family. I never meant to make one for myself.”
River spoke for the first time in a long time. “You didn’t.”
“I didn’t want a family or I didn’t make a family?”
“Either. Neither. Both.” She was giving him the how-dumb-can-you-be look that she usually reserved for Simon. Eventually she gave up and explained Mal’s own life to him. “You weren’t trying to make a family. You were trying to make a crew.”
“So we’re not a family? We’re a crew?”
She kept giving him that look. Finally: “Zoe did it. Not you. And over your objections. Zoe started making your crew into a family when she married Wash. Then you hired Kaylee and you made her your little sister. Later you let me and Simon stay and now Simon’s with Kaylee, so that makes him something like your brother now, which makes me your little sister, too!” And she gave him a happy echo of that look she reserved for her brother. Or brothers.
“And Inara?” Mal immediately knew he shouldn’t have asked. He tried to cover. “And Jayne? What about Inara and Jayne, are they family, or crew?”
River looked like she was giving up completely on Mal. She started to get up and leave the bridge, but she turned on her way out and said simply “What Inara is, is up to you and Inara. What Jayne is, is up to Jayne.” She pressed her palm to the doorframe as she left Serenity’s bridge.
Mal was just beginning to ponder the subtleties of that, when he realized she was still talking to someone as she went down the stairs. “I think you’re ready for a family.”
Mal turned in the pilot’s chair to see who she was talking to, then got up and looked out the door and down, but there was nobody there he could see.
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