Chapter Forty-Six: Riddick - Full Fathom Five

Riddick traced the curve of Jack's jawline with one finger, watching her sleep. It was almost dawn on New Paris; he'd relented and let her go to sleep three hours ago when she became so tired that her sentences were no longer very coherent. Some of the things she'd been saying had become humorously surreal as her inner dream world clamored for attention. He wished she talked in her sleep; he'd have loved to listen in.

His own dreams were made of shadow and fire, burning mathematical constructs and impossible vistas in which the laws of physics were flagrantly violated. Nothing concrete existed there. No human beings populated the landscape of his dreaming mind. Freud and Jung, he often thought, would have turned pale and fled if he'd described his dreams to them. A great many of their followers had done so over the years.

He knew it wasn't the norm. Friends of his, and others he'd known, had described the types of dreams they had, and he knew they were very different. He'd had dreams like theirs himself, until he was seven. After he'd woken up in the hospital, everything had begun to change for him.

"These are the pearls that were his eyes," he thought to himself with amusement. Yeah, got that right.

Funny... four and a half years ago, halfway into his first sojourn with Jack, there had been one hilarious night that had seen the two of them sitting up late, concocting ridiculously extravagant compliments to bestow on each other. It had been a kind of competition, with unofficial points for originality, humor and sweetness. He was pretty sure it had been Jack's idea, another of her concepts to help him become more socialized so he could rejoin the human race.

In the midst of it all, still doubled up with laughter from his lengthy paean about her ears, she'd told him that his eyes were black pearls.

These are the pearls that were his eyes, he thought again, staring down at the beautiful girl in his arms. She was one of the few people who had never feared his eyes. She'd liked them from the first time she saw them.

He hadn't gotten the shine job until shortly before he was to be shipped out to Nereid, of course, but at times it seemed like he'd always had it... or at least, since he was seven. That was when his personal sea-change, still ongoing, seemed to have begun. In retrospect, that was when he'd begun seeing into the dark.

That was when he began lying awake at night, studying the world from his bed. The only times he ever needed more than an hour or two of sleep a night, from then on, were when he was under abnormal stress.

He'd slept through the nights with Jack at the clinic, his mind retreating from the waking world and the almost-irresistible temptation sharing the bed with him. He'd slept heavily after their fight. On those occasions she'd actually awakened first. He'd spent huge quantities of his time sleeping for several weeks after Jack had been shot, until he'd learned she was still alive. His time on the skiff with Imam and Jack -- and Carolyn's very palpable absence -- had been much the same, as he recovered from his physical and non-physical wounds.

And, of course, there had been the nights after Jarvis's betrayal.

Most of the time, however, an hour or two was all he needed. The rest of his time was spent awake, studying the world. That had been the first of the changes that had overtaken him.

Often it seemed to him the he had always seen in the dark, that his eyes had always been the way they were now. He remembered colors, of course; that was one of the few things he actually missed. When he had his spectrum goggles or contacts on they compensated almost completely, leaving him at no greater disadvantage than someone who was red-green color-blind. Of course, when he'd gotten the shine job he'd thought he was never going to see color again anyway. Nereid had been locked in endless night.

"Mmmmm..." Jack sighed in his arms, turning her face to press it against his fingers. "Riddick..."

He smiled quietly to himself. It felt, at times, like that had always been his name, too. And from her it was actually a name worth hearing...

Names.

He'd been "Richie" until he was five, when Christina moved into the foster home and took him over. She had insisted on calling him "Bryan." It had been his name for the next two years, until everyone who had said that name with affection was torn away from him and he could no longer stand hearing it.

Whenever anyone asked him, from then on, what his middle initial stood for, he always told them: "Betrayed." Few people expected to hear such a thing from a seven-year-old boy and it shut them up fast.

Velma Skinner had briefly tried to call him "Richie," but it didn't stick. They'd finally settled on "Richard," "Rich" for short. That had been his name for the next three years. Jarvis had returned at the end of that time and had seemed dismayed by the discovery that "Bryan" Riddick no longer existed. A week later he'd found himself in a new foster home.

It had amused him at the time. Which one of us is having an identity crisis? he'd been tempted to ask. He'd been glad that he'd refused to get attached to Velma or any of his foster siblings, though.

Of course he hadn't gotten attached to them. He'd learned his lesson well. Lieutenant Jarvis had taught him that, if nothing else. No one would ever be let inside him as much as Christina had been, as much as Patty and Val, and Aunt Mel... and the stranger he'd once called Uncle Reg and had hoped would be his father.

He'd kept that vow until he'd discovered that Jack had taken up residence inside him. He hadn't even noticed her moving in; she'd just suddenly been there. He'd found "property of Jack Kowalczyk" signs all over his psyche, all over his soul. That had been four and a half years ago and had been one of the most startling moments in his life.

He gazed down at her now, remembering their conversation from a few hours ago.

"So what's with the 'kid' thing, anyway?" she'd asked him, mock-annoyance on her face. "I can understand you calling me that the first time we were together, but now? I mean, would you do this--"

And she'd pressed her body suggestively against the length of his, undulating.

"--with a kid?" Her smile had been wicked. He'd laughed and pulled her even more tightly against him, maneuvering so he could enter her body once more. He loved being inside her.

"Nah," he'd told her, stroking her hair in time with his thrusts as he drank in the look of exquisite pleasure on her face. "It's the Casablanca kind of 'kid.' You know... 'here's looking at you' and all that."

"Rick and Ilsa?" she'd asked, her hands moving over his back.

"Yeah, them. 'Cept I'm never gonna put you on any flight away from me."

"I'd never let you," she'd answered softly. He'd leaned down and buried his face in her hair. After a moment she'd spoken again. "You know, the 'Rick' kind of works. A lot of men named Richard go by that. Did you ever?"

"Yeah..." That had been the last coherent thing either of them had been able to say for a while, though.

His new foster home, back when he was ten, already had a "Rich." They'd insisted on calling him "Rickie," despite his brief protests. He loathed diminutives, one of the reasons he'd never tried to call Jack "Jackie." Mostly he tolerated it, insisting that his school friends just call him "Rick" unless they had to talk to his foster parents.

That home had been easier to live in, in its way. He felt no draw to either Diane or Jim, his foster parents. Unlike with Velma, who had genuinely cared about him, tempting him to drop his guard, they were harried and uninterested in the emotional states of the dozen children they looked after. The school had been mostly the same.

His class had forty-seven children, including him. The teachers were even more harried than his foster parents, struggling to move the kids forward to the next unsatisfactory grade, hoping that violence wouldn't erupt. They were too busy dealing with the boys who brought knives and guns into the school to nurture any of the minds in their care. They hadn't noticed anythingmore than that he always did his homework; none of them spotted the uncanny fact that his papers were always flawless.

Until Miss Spenson, anyway.

She was an anomaly herself, actually. She'd just finished putting herself through college and had taken a position as a teacher in an inner city school because it would immediately clear off her obligation to her student loans. Four years of service to a deprived community and she'd be debt-free and able to move onto something better. That wasn't the anomalous part, of course. The clearing of debts in that way was one of the few inducements that kept teachers in the inner-city systems.

The anomaly was that she did more than just keep the kids in her classroom, more than just struggle with the ones who had behavioral problems. She'd noticed Riddick's adeptness at his work and she'd recruited him, asking him to tutor some of the other kids who needed help. In return, she accelerated his own studies, looking for ways to challenge him intellectually.

She'd been the first real friend he'd let himself have since he was seven, the first one he'd been willing to share his ambitions with. She'd entered him in the mathematics contest and had commiserated with him after his violent illness prevented him from going. She'd campaigned to get him into the Albany Technical Academy.

"You have what it takes, Rick," she'd told him as she'd filled out the forms. "You're like one of those legendary test-pilots from back at the start of space travel. The ones who had to be mechanics and physicists as well as pilots. Men like Armstrong and Lovell and Glenn, who barely even flinched even when their ships tried to go to pieces under them. Geniuses with nerves of steel."

That had happened to be a week after he'd disarmed one of his classmates who'd brought a gun into school. Such incidents were so common that nobody bothered reporting it, of course. But Karen Spenson had made her approval abundantly clear.

Under her guidance, he'd become infatuated with the idea of one day being a pilot, sailing through the oceans of night and the myriad worlds that humankind had claimed. He hadn't actually believed that anyone would let him into the academy until the day his letter of acceptance came.

He'd been "Rick" at the Academy, too. He'd been "Rick" until the day everything fell apart within his mind.

After that, he'd been "Richard B. Riddick, psycho murderer."

Karen Spenson had come every day to the trial, along with Velma Skinner and Melanie Jarvis and her daughters. He was older than both girls now. All of them had cried throughout the proceedings. In his lucid moments he'd tried to get his attorneys to have them removed.

"They're your only hope for clemency, Rickie," one of the lawyers had told him.

"I don't want clemency. If you had any fuckin' sense you wouldn't even ask for it." The Rickie bit infuriated him. It was a calculated avuncular ploy, and he already knew how treacherous uncles were.

And of course, "Uncle Reg" had showed up again, trying to call him "Bryan" and telling him that some kind of deal had been struck with the judge, releasing him into Jarvis's custody.

Fuck that, he'd thought, and promptly attacked one of his attorneys, the one who insisted on calling him Rickie, putting the man into the hospital for a month and guaranteeing that nobody would release him into anyone's custody.

Finally he'd just been "Riddick." Just another felon inside the prison system, feared by his fellow inmates and guards alike. All of the other names had fallen away. And until Jack had come into his life, nobody had spoken that name with affection, much less love. He didn't need any other names. Not now. The first time Jack had gasped "Riddick" while she came, he'd known he never wanted to be called anything else.

He stroked her cheek again, leaning down to kiss her forehead. She'd changed him more than anyone else.

Sitting up, he reached for the two remaining star charts at the foot of the bed. She was the first person he'd taught anything other than combat to since his days in Miss Spenson's classroom, and he was happy to discover it was still just as much fun as it had been then. Of course, she was much sharper than any of those students had been.

So what do you have for me, Babe? he thought as he unfolded one chart and began to examine it.

He smiled to himself as he traced out the route. This was the textbook route, perfect in every detail. It was the route everybody took when they passed through that section of space, so commonly used that it was just called Shipping Lane V-315. Punch those numbers into your nav-comm and your ship would fly the course while you slept. Very good, he thought. He'd known Jack would find it.

But what had she come up with for the fourth chart? He unfolded it with interest.

Interest quickly became fascination. If he wasn't mistaken, this route worked... He began poring over the calculations she'd used, the resource maps.

Holy shit, Jack, he thought. Not only does this one work, it's a whole day faster than V-315.

He began to laugh. Beside him, Jack stirred and smiled a little in her sleep. After a moment he folded up the charts and put them away, lying down beside her once more and drawing her back into his arms.

No wonder you're such a pleasure to teach, he thought as he closed his eyes and joined her in sleep. I can't wait to try the route you discovered.