by Graham, Jo
“A very informative presentation,” S.R. Desai said in his accented English. “You make your points with great lucidity.”
“Thank you very much, Mr. Desai,” Teyla said politely.
“I wonder, have you trained as a diplomat in your place?” he asked. “Or did I understand that you are a soldier?”
“I am neither soldier nor diplomat,” Teyla replied. “In my own world I am a trader. I have represented my people for many years in matters of commerce, arranging the most advantageous sales of our goods on other worlds, and attempting to import the things we need at fair prices. We are a poor people, we Athosians, compared to many in the galaxy, and we have never been able to produce many of the medical or technical things that we use.”
Desai nodded gravely, his close cropped white hair in sharp contrast to his dark skin and dark eyes. “A very understandable circumstance.”
“This work is a change.” Teyla looked around the emptying conference room. “I was never trained to represent millions of people in matters of life and death.”
“And yet you are rising to it,” Desai said. “The world sometimes changes in unpredictable ways. Power shifts.” His eyes flicked to Shen Xiaoyi, who passed them with a sniff.
There was something to that, Teyla thought, some rivalry or bad feeling that she knew as yet too little of the history of their world to understand. There were so many stories, and she had only begun to scratch the surface of them. She could not yet put the pieces together as she did at home, all the nuances of politeness and shades of meaning that held deadly intention.
“Tell me,” Desai asked, “If your Atlantis were in the Pegasus Galaxy once more, would it be an open port?”
“I do not quite know what you mean by that,” Teyla replied. The others had almost all left the room. Presumably Mr. Woolsey had gone ahead to welcome people to the reception.
“Would ships of other nations be able to call there, other than only ships of the American military?”
“I would expect that all of our friends would be welcome at any time,” Teyla said. “The journey is hazardous, and we should never turn an ally from our door. At the moment, with the Sun Tzu badly damaged, only the American military possesses ships with the Asgard drive necessary to reach our galaxy.”
Desai’s eyes searched her face. “As it stands, yes. But no technological secret remains a secret forever. Once we know you are there, we will come. It is a matter of human nature.” He smiled, and it was not an unkind expression. “You must get your Mr. Woolsey to give you a book about the demarcation line set between Spain and Portugal at the Treaty of Tordesillas. And how well it worked.” He nodded to her gracefully. “I give you good evening.”
“Good evening, Mr. Desai.” Teyla reached back to pick up her laptop, letting him precede her from the room.
John and Sam were talking in the hallway, their heads bent together, and Teyla went to join them.
“Where is Torren?” she asked.
“General O’Neill has him,” Sam said. “Torren’s awake, so he took him to the reception.”
John shrugged. “It’s ok. It’s not like he’ll drop him off the balcony or something.”
“He’s a responsible person. Really,” Sam said, looking like the entire idea amused her tremendously. “How did the meeting go?”
Teyla spread her hands. “Truthfully, I do not know. They listened. At least most of them did. Mr. Nechayev did not, though he asked me at the break if I were married and if my husband were here.”
Sam rolled her eyes. “You know he’s hitting on you, right? And that you can punch him in the chops, IOA member or not?”
“I can handle Mr. Nechayev,” Teyla said. “Believe me, I have seen many like him when arranging trade agreements.”
“I’ll handle Nechayev,” John said with a dark look.
“John. There is no need for that,” she said, though she softened it with a smile. “And I thought you had said that you would have no part in the diplomacy, aside from the military briefing on the Wraith that Mr. Woolsey is having you give tomorrow morning before they leave.”
John glanced sideways at Sam, half a smile on his face. “For some reason Woolsey thought he’d better keep me away from the diplomatic parts.”
“I can’t imagine why,” Sam said with a grin. “But you do have to put in an appearance at the reception, and so do I, like it or not.”
“And I should retrieve Torren,” Teyla said. “I should not like for him to bother General O’Neill.”
Together, they walked through the gateroom and out onto the exterior balcony. The tables had been covered with white cloths and a buffet table ranged along one end, a bar along the other. Most of the senior members of the expedition were there looking uncommonly scrubbed, though Teyla thought that Carson must have done something unfortunate to his hair. It was standing up as strangely as John’s.
O’Neill was holding forth to Mr. Okuda and Ms. Blegan, Torren perched on his shoulder cheerfully, one arm around the back of his neck while the other tried to intercept the hors d’oeuvre in the general’s gesturing hand. Teyla made a speedy approach, John and Sam on her heels.
“Thank you so much for watching Torren,” she said, as O’Neill bent and handed him back to her, Torren making one last try for the fancy food. He giggled, curling onto her, grabbing a handful of her hair.
“He’s a good kid,” O’Neill said easily. “I know you’ve both met Teyla Emmagan, but I don’t know if you’ve met Colonel Carter and Lt. Colonel Sheppard. She’s in command of our new battlecruiser, the George Hammond, and Sheppard is the military commander of the Atlantis expedition.”
There were the usual greetings all around, and it was a few moments before Teyla could disengage with Torren, who seemed on his sunniest best behavior. Amazingly. “You are a trader,” she whispered in his ear. “You are the son of a trader and the grandson of a trader, and you have a trader’s smile.”
Torren giggled, his eyes bright.
“He’s the face of the Pegasus Galaxy,” O’Neill observed. Sam was deep in conversation with the two IOA members. He peered down his nose at Torren, who giggled again. “A very charming face.”
“That is what Mr. Woolsey suggested,” Teyla said.
“You don’t have a problem with that?”
Teyla shook her head. “If the sight of my child will convince them to assist the millions of children they do not see, I have no complaints.” O’Neill was frowning. “You think I am being used.”
“Yes,” he said.
“I know I am being used,” Teyla said. “And what of it? My people are not here to speak. If they are moved to the good by a pretty face, then do I not owe it to my people to use whatever means are necessary? I assure you, I am quite comfortable with being a cynical ploy.”
O’Neill’s eyebrows rose. “As long as you’re ok with that.”
“I do have limits,” Teyla said. Her eyes sought Nechayev, who must assuredly be here. Alarmingly, he was standing by the bar with a glass in his hand talking to John. “Oh no.”
O’Neill followed her gaze. “What?”
“I am afraid John is going to give Mr. Nechayev a piece of his mind for hitting on me,” Teyla said. “That would not be wise.”
“Into the fray,” O’Neill said, gesturing her and Torren forward and following them.
“I have been many places,” Nechayev was saying loudly, gesturing with his drink. “But it was unique.”
John laughed, a beer in his hand. “That it was.”
“We are in complete accord,” Nechayev said to O’Neill as he approached. “The Colonel and I have a great deal in common. Many common places, many common experiences. But there is nothing more true than this.” He lifted his glass and touched it to John’s beer bottle, as they said in unison, “Kandahar sucks!”
“Colonel, could you come with me a moment?” Teyla asked politely. “There is someone I have promised I shall introduce to you.”
“Sure,” he said. �
�Later, Konstantin?”
“Later, John,” Nechayev said cheerfully. “We must cover more ground together, yes?”
“Absolutely.” He waved his beer bottle at him as Teyla towed him away. “What’s up? Who do you need to introduce me to?”
“No one. I did not want you to antagonize Nechayev.” Teyla glanced back at the IOA member, who was now talking to O’Neill.
“We were getting along fine.” John shrugged. “He was in Afghanistan with the Russian Air Force in the 80s. It turned out we had a lot in common.”
“Kandahar sucks?”
“It’s common ground.” John shrugged again, putting the bottle down on the table behind him as Torren made a lunge for him, swinging Torren up onto his shoulder. “He was ok.”
“What did you say to him?” Torren grabbed the back of John’s hair, grinning out over the crowd like a benevolent monarch.
John shifted from foot to foot. “He was fine once I told him you were my wife.”
Teyla blinked. “I suppose that would do it,” she managed. Annoyance and fondness warred within her. He should not misrepresent her so, and yet it did no damage. It was not as though she intended for Nechayev to court her.
“It just seemed like the easiest solution,” John said sheepishly. “He’d seen me walking around with Torren earlier.”
“I am not angry,” she said. “Should I be?”
“I don’t know.” He looked off toward the railing and the sea beyond.
Teyla came and put her hand on the rail beside him, carefully keeping Torren inside. “I am not Sam, who has spent her life proving she can walk and chew gum at the same time.”
He looked at her sideways with a little smile. “You can walk and chew gum?”
“Except that I do not like gum. So I do not chew it to prove a point.”
She glanced past him at Sam, her hair swept up from her collar, wearing her beribboned service dress, talking to the IOA members. Dixon-Smythe was talking to Carson while looking around him to see who of more importance was available, while a very combed Radek was chatting up Blegan and Okuda with Sam. Woolsey had Shen to himself over by the refreshment table, with her maneuvered into a corner with her back to the rail. Desai was filling his plate a foot away, he and Shen completely ignoring one another. Beyond them, the lights of the Bay Bridge hung like pearls on a thread against the dark sky. A cool wind off the sea lifted her hair even in the shadow of the standing heaters. The towers of Atlantis glittered against the stars.
So many currents, so many conflicts, their shadows dancing over every moment of beauty.
“Your world is a very complicated place,” Teyla said.
“You can say that again,” John replied.
Chapter Two
Stasis
The battle was over. The impact of energy bolts on the shield had stopped some time ago, and then after a bit there had been a heavy thud—the city landing, surely. Guide—he would not think of himself as Todd, the meaningless sound the humans had applied to him—had seen nothing of Earth except the military laboratories, but he guessed that there were oceans big enough to land the city. Or perhaps the Ancients had built better than he knew, and the city could be brought safely down onto solid ground.
Speculation was pointless. He rose to his feet, paced the length of the cell and back again, one part of his mind counting the strides. That ritual had passed the time before, given him an illusion of freedom: count the steps until he knew them by heart, the number and the rhythm, every shift of weight and balance, then walk that pattern in his mind, letting them take him elsewhere, to other places with that same cadence, some multiple of those dimensions. In Kolya’s prison, he had walked half a dozen hives, first his own where he ruled, queenless, plotting revenge, and then, as he starved, back and back until he had walked in memory the hive of his true Queen, tracing the corridors where he had been companion and Consort. She had honored him with a son, and then, as his utility had grown, with a daughter, a scarlet-haired miniature of herself. One pattern of steps had taken him through the coiling maze of the ship-wombs, safe and secret at the heart of the hive. In memory he walked the narrow spiral, past the daughter smiling in her sleep, the touch of Snow’s mind gentle on his own. It had been a bright memory then, new and sharp, but too much handling had robbed it of its power, til at the end it had granted him no more than a few tens of minutes’ escape.
Here in the City of the Ancients, his steps in memory had taken him nowhere so pleasant. The rhythms he had found so far led to the last days of the war, when he had been young and hadn’t expected to live long enough to hibernate for the first time, pacing the corridors in an adrenaline fog, hoping for and fearing the call to man the Darts… That was no place to be, not imprisoned here, but the next pattern had taken him only to the days after Snow’s death, trailing the clevermen as they swarmed the ship, fighting to heal its wounds before the next disaster broke over them like a wave.
This most recent pattern was the best, though it had its own dangers. In it, he walked the broken streets of a human city, newly-fed and strong, a blade among blades, seeking the strongest of the survivors. They had Culled well already, their holds were full; this was sport, and glorious. They had climbed through the white-stone wreckage of a building, avoiding a well-set trap by the breadth of a finger and the quickness of a cleverman’s eye, tracked the humans to their hole and fed upon them, feeling their wounds close and heal. And stood together afterward, mind in mind, sharing, delighting in their strength and skill…
Guide let his eyes focus again, pupils narrowing against the too-bright lights. The red walls loomed above him, the space too high, too sharply angled, for comfort. With the memory gone, his hunger returned, burning in his chest. His feeding hand ached; he closed his fingers sharply, snarling to himself. Sheppard had fed him once, but that had been a matter of dire necessity, and the human had had an enemy to hand. It would not happen again. It was most likely he would die in this place, and the best he could hope for was the mercy of a quicker end.
It was worth it, though. The men who had betrayed him were dead, and, an unexpected bonus, Atlantis was removed from Pegasus. There would be time for his alliance to regroup, find a new leader—Bonewhite, most likely, or perhaps Iron. He regretted dying, would fight it if he could, but, on balance, the price was not too high. Sheppard had seen him starving, would know when the time came: Guide thought he could rely on him to give a clean death as he himself had once given the human life. He took a slow breath, letting his eyes drift out of focus, seeking inward for the escape of memory. He had patience still, and it was not yet time to die.
* * *
When John came into the gateroom in the morning Woolsey’s office door was closed. He seemed to be deep in conference with a woman John didn’t know, a black woman of Woolsey’s own age attired in an impeccable cream colored pants suit. A silk scarf around her neck gave a hint of color, and she and Woolsey seemed to be in agreement about something.
Frowning, John leaned over the control panel. Rodney was running a systems diagnostic on the gate from his laptop. “Who’s she? Another IOA member?”
Rodney didn’t look up. “No. New personnel. Dr. Eva Robinson.”
“Oh.” John relaxed. “For you, then.” They had not even begun to replace the science personnel they’d lost, and it was good to see Woolsey start doing something about that.
“Not for me exclusively, no.” Rodney tapped the keys furiously. “She’s our new psychologist.”
“Why do we need a psychologist?” John grumbled.
Rodney stopped and looked up. “Because we’re nuts.”
“Speak for yourself.”
“I intend to. I’m going to be her very first appointment,” Rodney said. “Look, we haven’t kept a shrink more than six weeks since Heightmeyer was killed.”
“That’s because they take one look at us and quit,” John said truthfully.
“That’s because we keep getting these kids right out of school wh
o have no idea what they’re getting into,” Rodney said. “In case you hadn’t noticed, we have an incredibly stressful job.”
“What, because we might get killed any minute? And because weird shit happens all the time?” John shook his head. “We don’t need another roadblock, Rodney. Somebody who insists that what’s going on isn’t happening or that telepathy doesn’t exist or that somebody’s deluded instead of possessed. That’s not going to do anybody any good.”
“Heightmeyer was all right with that once she got used to it,” Rodney said. “She got over it. And Robinson’s no stranger to weird. She’s done some work with the SGC. Sam recommended her.” Rodney closed his laptop. “Besides, she’s just here for the duration of our time on Earth, to help with,” he made quotation marks with his fingers, “transition issues.”
“You mean like getting used to not getting shot at?” John glanced back toward Woolsey’s door again. “Good luck with that.”
“I think that’s exactly it,” Rodney said. “And you may laugh at my constant monitoring of my mental health, but you should think about this. Your brain is the only one you’ve got.”
“And you’ve got the most valuable brain on the planet,” John said.
“So I have to keep it in tip-top shape.” Rodney gathered his laptop up and stood. “Even you’ve got to change the oil in your brain from time to time.”
“That is a really disgusting metaphor,” John said. “And I’ve seen your brain, remember? I’ll pass on seeing it again.”
Rodney paled. “We could skip that. Drilling into my head with an electric drill…”
John put his hands in his pockets. “So you go tell Robinson about your phobia of electric drills. I’ll just…”
“…do the thing you do,” Rodney said. He looked for a second as though he wanted to say more. “I’ll see you at lunch,” he said.
