little star, how I wonder where you are
Title: Canary in the Coal Mine
Fandom: Firefly

Characters: Simon, River
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer:  I do not own these characters, and this is not the SPN fic I should be working on! (not that I own those characters, either). This story goes in too many different directions, but the challenge is up today and, well, I'm done.  The epigraph is Joan Feynman, speaking about her brother, the polymath physicist Richard Feynman. Written for the "extinct animals" challenge (207) over at ff_friday and "twinkle" at firefly_15_fics 

When I was a child, it was believed that animals became extinct because they were too specialized. My father used to tell us about the saber-toothed tiger’s teeth—how they got too big and he couldn’t take game anymore.  And I remember my father saying, with my brother sitting there, “I wonder what it will be with human beings…” My father never found out that my brother was working on the bomb.

River found the box not long before Simon found River.  He’d been cataloguing their stores—“might as well make yourself useful,” Mal had said, thrusting the manifest into Simon’s hands on his way out. “Potential employment opportunity,” was all he would say, but the fact that he took both Zoe and Jayne with him said more than enough.  Kaylee and Book had left not long before, bound for the marketplace: Serenity needed new gravity bindings and the mechanic had discovered that folks had a way of lowering their prices when there was a Shepherd involved. They’d taken Wash with them.  (“Why me?”  the pilot had wanted to know.  He’d had some quality Cortex-watching scheduled.  “Because you can talk rice into selling white for cheap, husband?” Zoe had suggested.  “Well,” Wash considered, “every man has his talents, I reckon.”).  With Inara out calling on a client, that left Simon in the pantry and River—well, River had been on her own recognizance until about five minutes ago, when it occurred to her brother that this might not be the wisest course of action.

“River?”  he calls from the pantry.  She’d started out in the galley, excavating cabinets and tallying tins.  She hadn’t been terribly helpful.

“Thirteen tins of beans, one dented, at….” River would heft a tin, squinting at it speculatively, “approximately 987 beans per tin.  Total yield: 12, 831 beans.” And she’d make a note: beans =12831 minus quantity defined D, where D is equal to area lost as the sum of all dents.  “Rice: five sacks, with approximately 1,156,012 grains per—”  

“Uh, River?” Simon had interrupted.  “I don’t think we need that much detail.  Just write down how many sacks, all right?”

“Accuracy is never wasted,” River had sniffed, sounding just like Father.  “And now you’ve made me lose count!”

After that, Simon left her to her calculations, figuring he’d go back later and convert them back into recognizable units (what did she mean by twelve breakfasts of egg tablets? or 8.25 Jayne-servings of noodles?).  Now he realizes he can’t hear her counting, hasn’t heard her for a while. 

“River?”  he calls again. He puts down the manifest and pokes his head out into the galley. No one here. He glances down the hallway toward the cargo bay and the guest quarters: maybe she’d gotten tired and gone to her room?  No; he’d have heard her on the stairs.  He stands for a moment in the empty kitchen, listening to the silence of the ship settled around him and fighting the first sparks of panic that always flicker to life when River goes missing.

“River?  Riv—ufh!” He nearly trips over her: she is seated on the floor in front of one of the narrow storage cabinets that line the corridor up to the bridge, surrounded by bits of paper. 

She looks up at him, exasperated.  “Well, don’t stand on it,” she says, tugging one of the scraps from beneath his foot.

“What is all this, meimei?”  These storage closets weren’t used for food, or for anything the crew might need regular access to, actually: a design flaw meant that the recessed panels that served as doors completely blocked the narrow corridor when they were open.

River had pried them open somehow and pulled out the old ammunition boxes that lived on those shelves.  The boxes—flat, olive-drab metal with flip-top lids and rubber gaskets—were ubiquitous on the rim planets, a popular means of waterproof storage for everything from oats to paper.  Simon even remembers a few of them from his own childhood: his mother had used them to store winter woolens out of season, though how the wife of an Osiran lawmaster had come to possess ammunition canisters was a mystery.

“Home,” River whispered, and Simon is amazed once again at her knack for reading his thoughts, until he realizes that she is not talking to him. “…Find a home…no, make—build.  Build a home,” his sister mumbles anxiously, sifting through the contents of one of the boxes, sorting the items into three piles, then combining two of them, reshuffling, four piles this time…

“I don’t think you should be playing with these,” Simon plucks one of the objects from a pile.  It’s a booklet about the size of a playing card—no, not a booklet: it unfolds into a sheet of waxed canvas, about twice the size of a handkerchief.   For a moment he’s not sure what he’s looking at, and then the printed lines and squiggles resolve themselves into a map.  But not an aerial traffic map, like the kind Wash pulls up on the bridge monitors, and not one of the illuminated celestiography tapestries that Inara has decorating her shuttle.  This is a land-surface map: a legend, a compass rose, characters printed around a green surface: Serenity Valley, a large brown stain along the southern edge.

“Not playing,” River says, her fingers still busily unfolding another map-packet. “Looking for home.”

Simon’s breath catches.  His sister hasn’t mentioned Osiris once since she tumbled out of the cryogenic storage container onto the floor of Serenity’s cargo bay.  “Meimei—this isn’t home,” he says as soothingly as he can.  “Look,” he kneels down and holds the map flat against the wall, “It’s not even the same planet. See, it says Serenity Val—”

River looks up from her work and rolls her eyes at her brother’s density.  “Not for us.  Home for Twinkle.”  She holds out her hand: in the palm is an origami-style bowl, made out of twisted paper.  Simon can still see the raster grid and a web of small blue marks that signify bodies of water.  “A nest,” River says simply.

“Oh.”  Simon says, because he will never be able to follow his sister’s mental leaps.  “Of course. For Twinkle.”

*          *          *          *          *

The week before, during a layover on Bernadette, Kaylee had crawled half-under Serenity’s starboard thruster, reached up to adjust the filter frame, and felt it tremble in her hand.  She’d tentatively slid her fingers back along the frame plate.  Nothing.  No, wait…again, that panicked fluttering.  Mal had often said that she could feel the ship in a fundamental way that others couldn't—but this was ridiculous!  Wedging herself a little more deeply under the ship, she had peered up into the thruster cavity and caught a quick, bright gleam—an eye?—just as something soft and fragile landed in her palm. Startled, she had jerked back, smacking her head against a strut. When she clambered clumsily from under the ship and put grimy fingers to her scalp, she could already feel a lump forming. 

“Don’t worry,” River had announced, appearing barefoot in the dust at the corner of Kaylee’s vision so suddenly that the mechanic jumped again.  “Simon can fix it.” And Kaylee hadn’t known whether the girl was talking about the bump on her head or the small bird in the palm of her right hand.

Both, it turned out.  Simon had cracked open a cryo pack for Kaylee’s head and dug out a few bandages and a box that once held alcohol wipes to serve as temporary home for her bird.  It huddled in the corner, left wing mangled, playing dead.

“The swelling should go down soon enough,” Simon observed.  “How does it feel?”

“Oh, fine.  I’m fine.  Just a little bump, is all,” Kaylee insisted, already ignoring the cryo pack.  “Isn’t he a cute one?”  she peeked into the nest.

Simon put the pack back in her hand, moved her hand back to her head.  “It’s a canary.  Keep the ice on,” he reminded gently.

“Why’s he all yellow?”  Jayne wanted to know. The merc had followed Kaylee and River in from the hallway, just in case they had something really good.  He’d been kind of disappointed to see it was just a ruttin’ bird.

“It just is.  That’s how I know it’s a canary: they’re yellow.”

“I’ve never seen one before,” Kaylee breathed, her face inches from the nest. “I mean, Inara’s got a real pretty shawl with little birds all over it, but I ain’t never seen a real one.”

Jayne huffed. “Warn’t missing much.”

“There aren’t many still around,” Simon conceded, ignoring Jayne.  “Birds, I mean.  And I didn’t know there were any canaries, to be honest. Terraformed atmosphere doesn’t suit them, so unless they’re specifically cultivated…” he had let his words trail off.  He could see Kaylee had already fallen in love with the little thing, and he couldn’t bring himself to tell her how unlikely it was to survive.

“Aha!”  Wash had wandered in from the corridor. He addressed their new feathered friend. “Were you that weird ker-thump I felt when we first entered atmo?”

Kaylee gasped.  “D’you think he got caught in the engine?”

“No,” River said, before Wash could explain that he was just teasing.  Simon looked up from the bird.  His sister was standing in the corner of the infirmary, crowded away from the examination table with the bird’s box. She couldn’t even see the bird from where she stood, but she continued with absolute confidence, “The other birds attacked him.”

“Now, why would they go an’ do a thing like that?”  Kaylee had wailed, undone by the injustice of it all.

“Sometimes, wild birds will attack the more exotic ones,” Simon had explained, just as his father had explained it to him when he’d started keeping them as pets. As a child, Simon had figured that heaven must be pretty much like the east balcony, where Father kept gloriously plumed pets in giant rosewood cages amid small fountains and greenery. As an adult…well, it was still a pretty thought. “Their bright colors attract predators to food sources and—”

“They’re different,” River interrupted, her voice low but fierce enough to silence the others.  “They’re brighter.  And stranger.  They’ve been places, and they remember things.  The other birds, the dull ones—they’re jealous.”

*          *          *          *          *

“Is that what Kaylee’s decided to call her bird?” Simon asks carefully.  Since her pronouncement in the infirmary that first day, River has taken absolutely no interest in the bird.  She had taken no sides in Mal’s doomed attempt to talk Kaylee out of keeping it (“Kaylee, I got barely enough room for the people on this boat!”  “Aww, but Cap’n, he’s just a little mite, don’t take up hardly no space at all.”).   She hadn’t commented on the basket-cum-cage that Wash had constructed and hung to much admiration in a sunny corner of the bridge.  She hadn’t contributed suggestions as Book tried out various combinations of seeds and dried noodles, trying to approximate birdseed,  a concoction he’d read about at the Abbey.  

“I don’t know what Kaylee calls it,” River says shortly.  “That’s its name.”  She stands up, dusting off her skirt and adjusting her hair, which she’d turned into an elaborate spiked headdress after finding a cache of spare chopsticks next to the egg tablets.  Her interest shifts without warning.“Oh! I know where Jayne hid the extra protein blocks he stole from the market on Tianshen.  We should count those.”  And she ducks behind Simon, heading toward the galley; her shadow looks like it’s wearing a soft porcupine on its shoulder.

Simon is left standing in the corridor.  He sighs and starts shoving the ammunition boxes back onto the closet shelves.  One box holds nothing but old nails and weighs a geologic ton.  Another is half-full of tin discs that look like they might have been one of the local currencies now totally devalued by the adoption of the core credit system.  A third is labeled KAYLEE and he hesitates for a moment before popping the lid: it is full of what looks like sand.  He sifts it through his fingers, but there is nothing else.  Zoe is clearly of a more suspicious mind; the box with her name on it is sealed shut with a row of three-penny nails. And wasn’t she right to be so cautious, Simon decides, chiding himself for being so nosy.  On this ship where nothing is thrown away—everything is recycled, reused, repurposed—he shouldn’t be surprised that seemingly meaningless odds and ends are stored for future use.  Doesn’t mean he should take it upon himself to go through everything. 

The box that River had been picking through has MAL scratched into the paint; Simon kneels to gather up its spilled contents.   He is surprised to find that some of the scraps he’d mistaken for playing cards are actually photographs.  It’s been years since he’s seen anything but digitized holograms and, despite his resolution to give his shipmates their privacy, he can’t help but squint at the small pictures in the sunlight that spills down the hallway from the bridge.  Most are group shots: several young men mugging in front of a tent; a cluster of folks in rag-tag uniforms at a café table, toasting something; three people who could be triplets for all the mud they wear (based on the hair, Simon thinks the person on the far left might, might be a very young Zoe). A second suite of  photographs are visibly more worn at the edges: a house in the style of ranch buildings in the Eastern Quadrant; a half-dozen men in work clothes looking sheepish and well-scrubbed; a woman in a brimmed sunhat, standing by a laundry tub and holding up a hand to block the camera. 

Tents, laundry tubs, even non-holo pictures.  It’s all so…quaint. The pictures can’t be more than fifteen years old, and yet they’re so old-fashioned that Simon knows immediately where they were taken.

Out in the Black, where things don’t need fancy names, people from the core planets are called Core-folk. Among the worlds of the Core, people from the Black are known as the residua. It’s not meant pejoratively—not an insult, just a group noun for people from many different planets.  Simon can’t count the number of times he’s heard it without even thinking about it.  The Core Committee has passed a bill to regulate trade between the residua and non-certified merchants…, The Ladies’ League of Osiris has arranged a clothing drive to benefit those of the residua who have been most affected by the recent… New regulations directed at the residua will increase legislative representation in the Core Committee and…

It’s not until he and River end up on Serenity that Simon ever wondered about the word.  Residua—residual—left-over, left behind: the idea, borne out by every study and research program Simon can think of, is that Core influence is expanding, and that pretty soon the residua will cease to exist.  Core convenience and Core technology means you no longer have to grow your own food or sew your own clothing, much less wash it yourself.  In the months he’s been on Serenity, Simon can tell the planet-side markets are changing. It’s obvious just from today’s inventory of the pantry.  More and more of the produce is grown on cultivation moons owned by conglomerates and shipped out to the farflung planets by huge interplanetary shipping concerns that will one day put Mal Reynolds and other independent transporters out of business. 

When Wash had revealed that the Cortex encyclopedia listed canaries as an extinct species, Jayne had snorted.

“Looks pretty spry for extinct, if you’re askin’ me,”  the mercenary had observed.   

Book had been the one to explain that the Alliance eco-committee that determined which species were truly extinct tended to round to the nearest absolute.  “It’s not that there are absolutely no more—what did you call them, Simon, canaries? Just that there are so few as to be negligible.  It’s mostly statistics and a little wishful thinking: the canary will be gone soon enough, so lets just call it extinct now.  Neater that way.”

Tents and laundry tubs can still be found on the rim planets, but not for long.  Someday, and sooner than later, a firefly-class ship will be as rare as a genuine paper photograph, as rare as a yellow bird in the sky. A man will no more be able to make his living as an independent shipping agent than a woman will be able to find good work as a laundress. There’s no one to blame: Simon thinks of the Mudders, thinks of the enormous amount of work that goes into simply surviving on some of the planets they’ve visited.  Who wouldn’t trade that in an instant for the orderliness and security promised by Core commerce?  Might as well be extinct.

Simon slides the photographs into the box.  Based on the dusty lid, no one but River has opened it in a long time—perhaps since it was first placed on the shelf—so he doesn’t bother too much with the order. He follows the photographs with several folded printouts on browned paper, stamped embarkation orders.  There’s one sheet, a little larger than the others, that doesn’t fit in neatly with the rest.  It’s a simple, hand-written document with several closely written paragraphs beneath the blurry heading “Captain the Honorable Malcolm Reynolds.”  There’s an illegible signature scrawled at the bottom, next to a crudely drawn seal. Simon looks closely at the appended photograph.  A thinner, sunburned version of the Mal he knows looks tiredly back out, his hair ruffled by a bandage on his left temple. Captain the Honorable…commissioning papers, of course: battlefield promotion.

He reaches finally for River’s nest.  It unfolds easily enough and as Simon smoothes it out, he notices the handwriting.  Along the margins, in the blank spaces denoting fields or deserts or lunar seas, in a blend of tiny letters and quick characters, someone has inked notes into the canvas.

Next to a series of topographical markings—Tenth day of the seventh month: guide says avalanches at Gate-of-the-Mountains likely to have destroyed paths but can go over bridge at Yellow River if patrols not too regular.

In the plain between the blue lines of two rivers—3 days (??) after the solstice eclipse: trees here in bloom; white blossoms with pink @ center.  Lovely.  Smells like new bread.

Along a coastline—018/02: Z. returns w/local  intel, incl. most import:  watermelon patch.  Detail party to harvest; company eats until Corp’l Pyung makes self sick. 

Simon unfolds another map, the one he’d shown River, the map of Serenity Valley. There’s a long joke recorded in a mountain canyon, a vitriolic account of the weather in miniscule letters against the blue of Lake Wei, something untranslatable—an overheard folk song about a cloud?—inscribed in the foothills of  the Crane Mountains. Occasional notes about the supplies, or troop deployments, but mostly notes on the wildlife, the terrain, a sunset, a pretty girl in a market-town.  The notes here are sparser, but there are x’s marked across the lower half: a row along a riverbed, several dozen fill Serenity Valley itself. They don’t appear on the map’s legend.

“196,” River says and Simon looks up, startled. He hadn’t heard her come down from the galley.   She’s removed her chopsticks and now her hair floats in a static cloud, backlit by the light from the bridge. Her shadow obscures the map.

“196 what?” he asks testily.  Beans?  Individual noodles? Tea leaves?  What is she counting now?

“Souls.”  River twitches the map sideways and—of course, Simon sees it now.  Not an x, a cross.  Serenity Valley is a field of crosses.

 *          *          *          *          *

Simon and River are well into tabulating the protein stores when the rest of the crew returns.

“Oh, good,” Jayne says weakly when he sees his stolen merchandise on the galley table.  “I wasn’t sure if you’d, uh, find those blocks.  Put ‘em by for safe-keeping, clean forgot where they went.”

Simon nods. 

Mal and Zoe are pleased enough with their dealings not to call Jayne on the obvious lie. Wash, Kaylee, and Book are in high spirits, too, recounting their negotiations, each interrupting the other to get to the best part of the story. Kaylee dashes out at one point and comes back with the canary in its cage. 

“I just don’t want ‘im to get all lonely, up there in the bridge by himself,” she confides to Simon while Wash and Book bicker cheerfully about exactly who had driven the hardest bargain.

“River calls it Twinkle,” he says, because otherwise he’s going to confess what he knows to be true: the canary is already lonely, already alone.  The last of its kind, as good as extinct.  Like the people in Mal’s photographs, like the photographs themselves.  He feels as though he’s discovered the bones of some long-gone creature, perfectly preserved but unfathomably strange nevertheless.  Mal is an observant man, and one who likes his fun well enough, but Simon cannot imagine him noticing the leaves changing on the trees, commandeering a watermelon patch, keeping a journal. Just as Mal, surely, cannot imagine Simon at a Core dinner party, River at a dance recital.  Those people, and their worlds, are gone forever, and the ‘verse is a little emptier for it.