02 - The Price You Pay

by Ashley McConnell - (ebook by Undead)

  “We’ll find it.” O’Neill’s absolute assurance interrupted Daniel’s reverie. “It has to be here somewhere. We just haven’t looked in the right places yet.”

  “Maybe Hammond’ll send a team after us.”

  “Nope.” O’Neill didn’t look at him, merely continued to survey the city from mountainous horizon to mountainous horizon.

  “Why not? We’ve sent teams in before when contact’s been broken.”

  “Into the middle of a town?”

  Daniel thought about it. Say, SG-8, armed to the teeth, weapons ready, charging to the rescue, through the Gate and right in the middle of the vegetable auction.

  Well, maybe, but it was unlikely. Hammond wasn’t the type to declare war on vegetables.

  “A probe, maybe?” Sending another probe—now, that was a logical thing to do. Come to think of it, of course that’s what the general would do. It wouldn’t be a threat to the inhabitants, and SGC could gain intel from it without risking lives.

  Of course, even if Hammond did send another probe, it wouldn’t get them out of here. It would only allow them to let the General know what had happened to his people.

  O’Neill didn’t sound very enthusiastic about the idea either. “You plan to sit here and wait?”

  Well, that was a drawback. He shook his head.

  “Didn’t think so. So we’re going to keep looking. The control has to be here somewhere.”

  “Well, it must be a lot farther away from its Gate than any other DHD we’ve ever run into. I didn’t think it was possible to have one so far away.”

  “I didn’t think it was possible to walk on other worlds in my lifetime,” O’Neill said. “But here we are.”

  “Well, you’ve got me there.” Daniel half-sneezed. “But dammit, every place we go there’s pollen. Why is that?” He sneezed again and then coughed, clearing mucus from his throat. “I hope this isn’t a cold instead.”

  “Just lucky, I guess. You should apply to the Guinness Book of World Records as the person allergic to the most planets.” O’Neill paused in his absentminded banter to sharpen his attention on a figure making its way across the square to them. “Oh, look, teacher’s coming.”

  Daniel looked up from fumbling for a tissue to see the lithe figure of the female Rejected One crossing the square toward them. Last night, he seemed to recall, she’d been dressed appropriately for a head of state. Today her attire was much more practical and straightforward, a thigh-length brown tunic that left both arms and legs exposed. Her feet were bare. The visible flesh was nicely tanned. Her only adornment was a thin gold chain about one ankle. The noon sunlight danced in her hair, sparkling in the silver glints.

  O’Neill, Jackson could tell, had noticed. He had that pleased, appreciative glint in his eye, the one he got around attractive women. He even got it around Carter sometimes when she wasn’t looking.

  Alizane marched up to the foot of the platform, put her fists on her hips like an outraged washerwoman. “I have been told you are asking questions of our people,” she informed them. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Sightseeing,” O’Neill responded promptly. “Nice town you’ve got here.” He smiled, turning up the charm to full. “Nice people in it, too.”

  “Thank you.” Her words were reluctant. Aware of it though she might be, she wasn’t immune to his effort, and a smile struggled to express itself in return. Jackson thought of it as one more example of a profoundly polite culture—even a termagant couldn’t entirely overcome her conditioning. “Is there something in particular you are seeking on our world?”

  O’Neill’s teasing grin vanished. “We told you that already,” he said. “We’re looking for help against the Goa’uld.”

  Her expression sobered too. “And we have told you, you won’t find that help here. We’ve reached an accommodation that has worked for our world for centuries past counting. There is no reason for us to help you. I’m sorry, but when your people call for you, you must go back.”

  “That’s the other thing we’re looking for,” Daniel said, pushing his glasses up on his nose. Enough already of this frantic discreet searching. “Where’s the control panel for this Gate?”

  Alizane pulled her attention away from the colonel with difficulty and looked at him blankly. “The what?”

  “Daniel!” O’Neill growled. The more-than-half-flirtatious grin had long since vanished from the colonel’s face.

  But it was too late anyway. “The control panel. With the symbols on it. What you use to select the Gate destination. Where is it?”

  “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

  She really looked like she didn’t understand, which made no sense at all. But then, the request the night before hadn’t seemed to register either.

  “How do you control the Gate destination?” O’Neill demanded. As long as the cat was out of the bag—or somebody else was willing to ask for directions—he was flexible enough to change his tactics and pursue the question.

  It had to be a facade, Jackson decided. Had to be. That whole I-don’t-need-to-ask-for-help thing was about as real as the colonel’s flippancy and sarcasm. Like those two traits, it had a tendency to evaporate once the chips were down.

  “We control nothing,” the woman answered, as if baffled by the very possibility. “The Goa’uld open the Gate.” She looked from one to the other of them. “And so do you, I suppose. Does this mean we will have to deal with your people, too?”

  “We aren’t the Goa’uld,” O’Neill said between his teeth.

  Several of the people in the marketplace, attracted by the exchange, had casually wandered over and stood behind their Councilor, giving the two team members the feeling they were facing the beginnings of a mob. A polite mob, perhaps, but a mob nonetheless.

  “Even if you aren’t Goa’uld, what will you demand from us?” Alizane bristled. That was the core of her antagonism, Jackson realized suddenly. She knew they weren’t Goa’uld, but apparently whatever came through the Gate had to be more powerful than the M’kwethet, and she was worried about what that implied. He felt a sudden flash of sympathy for the belligerent woman.

  “We don’t demand anything.” O’Neill’s hackles were rising too. “Except that you stop dealing with the Goa’uld.”

  “You’re fools.” She stepped up on the platform beside them and spread out her hands, indicating the audience, the square, the whole vista stretched out before them. “Look at our city. This is what our sacrifice wins us—peace. Comfort. An opportunity to grow.”

  The audience murmured agreement.

  “Neville Chamberlain would be proud of you,” the colonel snarled.

  “Who?”

  Daniel stepped in, wishing he had a bucketful of ice water to throw over them both. “How do you know when the Gate will open?” he asked her, trying to defuse the conversation. “How do you know when the Rejected Ones are coming back?”

  She regarded him with a certain gratitude, apparently preferring to talk rationally with him instead of the colonel. At least Jackson wasn’t demanding that they turn their entire way of life upside down. “They send us a message through the Gate. One of the Jaffa comes. This allows us time to prepare the celebration and choose the new tribute. When you came, at first we thought you had been sent with such a message. Now—” She shrugged helplessly.

  “So you don’t have the capability to control the Gate from this side at all?”

  “Why should we? The Gates are a thing of the Goa’uld. We have no need of them ourselves; the Great Ones use them to take our tribute.”

  “How can you do this to your young people?”

  She laughed softly, bitterly. Her voice dropped so as not to carry to the assembled watchers. “Do to them? We ask nothing of them we have not been through ourselves, do nothing that hasn’t already been done to us. Only those who return through the Gate can be a part of the Council and choose the new tribute. Only those who know.”

  “And you
still do it?” Jackson was trying very hard to keep accusation out of his voice. But it really was a conspiracy, he thought. A conspiracy that had been maintained for generations.

  “Of course we do.” Her gaze shifted to O’Neill, traveled over his uniform. “Your friends call you colonel. Why?”

  “That’s my rank. I’m a military officer.”

  “Your world has military? Wars? Famine? Plague?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Goa’uld save us from all that.”

  “At the cost of what—twenty kids a month?”

  She sucked in her breath, managing to control her initial response, and said calmly, “Once. Now it is only every two years. You are fortunate to have come in a year of Return and Selection. Those who are selected are greatly honored, because they are willing to lay down their lives for their people. Doesn’t your world consider that an honorable thing to do?”

  “They couldn’t maintain twenty a month,” Daniel murmured, fascinated in spite of himself. “Not unless some of them got chosen more than once.”

  He also noted, absentmindedly, that all the attraction that had existed, however momentarily, between Alizane and Jack O’Neill had long since evaporated. Neither party appeared to miss it.

  “Fortunate? Honored? If you don’t mind,” O’Neill said evenly, “we’ll state our disagreement for the record. And we’ll get the hell out of here as soon as we can.” Jackson could recognize the signs: O’Neill had made up his mind and was going to cut his losses.

  Alizane shrugged, looking relieved. “So long as there aren’t more of you out there to interfere with us, you can do whatever you please.”

  “Oh, there are a lot more of us. There are more worlds out there than you can possibly imagine. But I doubt anyone else ‘out there’ would give you the time of day. They wouldn’t have anything to do with quislings either.”

  Alizane didn’t get the reference, of course. “Then we can agree on some things, can’t we? Both you and I will be well pleased to see you go.” Glancing at the Gate, she added, “It won’t open again until the day after tomorrow, our Returned Ones tell us. When it does, only the ones you hate so much will come through. You may wish to reconsider your position unless your own people come for you. But until then, I request that you stay out of our way. We have matters of our own to attend to.”

  As she turned and walked away, O’Neill protested, “They’re committing suicide, that’s all. They’re marching through that Gate—they’re sending kids through that Gate—to die. How can they do that?”

  Daniel searched his memory. “Well, you know, there’s precedent. Not just the legend of the Bull of Minos, but ritual suicide in Japan over matters of honor. Suttee in old India. It’s well established in many human cultures.” There was another Earth analogy, too, that had to do with twelve million people hoping that if they stood quietly in line their tormentors wouldn’t hurt them, but they had been wrong, too. He decided not to bring that one up.

  “Bull,” O’Neill said firmly. “It’s appeasement, and appeasement never works. One of these days the Goa’uld are going to come in here and wipe them out, and they’ll never be able to figure out why.”

  Apparently the colonel remembered the same analogy.

  * * *

  It was late in the afternoon when the citizens of M’kwethet began to gather again in the marketplace for the Choosing. Karlanan showed up first, using glares to herd O’Neill and Jackson away from the Gate, and then set up a small table with the yellow-and-black pottery bowl he had carried so carefully before. Off to one side a large brass gong was set up, and when everything was in place, Karlanan struck it, twice.

  The sound reverberated through the square, shivering in the awnings, bouncing off the high hills surrounding the town. The two Earth men grimaced and moved farther away, back against a wall, trying to keep the Gate platform clearly in sight.

  “I wonder where Sam and Teal’C are,” Daniel murmured.

  “That thought has occurred to me, too,” O’Neill growled. They had expected the other two to show up much earlier, and had remained at the Gate as the agreed-upon meeting place. They’d gotten used to the stares of the natives, and after a while the natives had gotten used to them too. Even the kids no longer found the strangers fascinating; they weren’t doing anything interesting.

  The square filled rapidly in response to the summons. Once again people stood and sat on the flat roofs and the second-story balconies. The previous day’s flowers were wilted and trampled, reflecting somehow the changed mood of the occasion. This time the crowd was silent, waiting. The only empty space left was directly in front of the Gate platform, and the crowd had edged back from it as if fearful of contamination.

  Karlanan, the cynosure of all eyes, waited until there was barely room for the audience to move, and then struck the gong again three times.

  The people pressed back, jostling each other, to make a pathway between the Agora and the platform. O’Neill found himself separated from Jackson by several bodies, but the other man was able to turn and acknowledge him. At least he wasn’t likely to be able to charge forward in this crowd, O’Neill thought, for all the reassurance that brought. Daniel might try to keep the peace in conversations, but under the right provocation, he also had a tendency to let his emotions run away from him and do some extremely risky and extremely unpredictable things.

  He craned his neck to see if he could spot Teal’C and Carter. They hadn’t seen the others since they’d gone to talk to the kids Carter had met the night before. He was feeling a little uneasy about them, though he doubted that anyone on this world would try to take on Teal’C, and anyone who tried to manhandle Carter was in for a substantial surprise. Still, with what looked like a very significant percentage of the population of the town—maybe even the world?—right here, there wasn’t any reason for them to be missing. The kids they’d been talking to ought to be right here with everyone else.

  He could see Jackson glancing around uneasily too. Great. If the scientist was getting nervous, that meant he wasn’t just kidding himself. There was a possibility of real trouble here.

  And what if the Gate opened right now? If Hammond did send another probe through? They’d lose their chance to escape; he wasn’t going to leave half his team stranded on this world. There weren’t any guarantees they would be able to get through again.

  Though maybe he could send Daniel back to explain matters while he rounded up the rest of the team. He allowed himself a moment of self-exasperation at letting the team split up, and then let it go. It was the best decision he could have made at the time. Who would have thought there’d be a world with no DHD?

  Well, he should have thought it. But that was hindsight.

  But there had to be a DHD. How else could this world “send” its tribute? The only thing that could go the “wrong way” through a Gate was radio waves. There had to be a way to open it from this side.

  As he strained to see, a procession began to issue from the portico of the Agora, up the hill. A whisper swept through the crowd, as if each person had contributed to a collective sigh, and then they were silent again.

  Leading the procession were about two dozen young men and women, dressed in identical white tunics trimmed with red. They walked in pairs, their lines ragged, as if no effort had been made to rehearse the moment or match sizes or strides. They carried sistrums, strings hung with bells and stretched between two pieces of wood, but they made no attempt to play them. The bells chimed softly, erratically, with their footsteps. O’Neill thought he recognized some of them as the young people joined by Jackson and Carter the night before. A quick glance at Jackson elicited a confirming nod. So the kids at that table had been set aside for a reason. These were the Candidates for Choosing. That fit with Carter’s request for further contact.

  And maybe the captain had succeeded. The ragged rows didn’t look happy about being in their little procession. As they came down the slope to the square, he could see faces paler
than usual. Apparently, O’Neill thought, the honor of it all had escaped them. Or at least a few of them had had serious second thoughts. As they came closer, starting up the steps to the platform, he thought he could see tension, nervous swallowing. The sistrums quivered from more than the vibration of footsteps.

  As the audience got a look at them, some voices were raised as if in protest, followed by a collective “hush” by their neighbors.

  Behind the double line came the dozen or so Rejected Ones they had watched return through the Gate. Today they were robed in bright, cheerful colors, blues and greens and yellows, as if a mobile flower garden proceeded down the path. Their faces were a study in conflicting emotions. A few kept their expressions as immobile as possible. The others vacillated between nervous laughter and attempts to be somber. O’Neill was nearly sure he spotted at least one tear rolling down a sun-bronzed cheek.

  Last of all came Alizane and Jareth, who wore a gown and cloak literally covered with real flowers. The perfume poured across the first few rows of spectators. The older Council member looked sad, but nodded every few steps to acknowledge the crowd. The crowd, for its part, nodded back, but made no sound at all.

  Alizane, oddly enough, was still dressed in the brown tunic, as if she hadn’t had the time to change into more festive attire. Her mouth—and a very nice mouth it was, O’Neill still admitted—was tight with fury. The last of the sunlight, catching the red highlights in her hair, made her look like a volcano in the process of erupting. Her gaze swept across the crowd as if she were looking for someone, and he pressed back against the wall, letting the people in front of him obscure her vision.

  The space in front of the platform had been filled by the young Candidates. The Returnees made their way up the steps to the platform, followed by the two Council members.

  As they sorted themselves out, a minor disturbance in the crowd behind the colonel attracted his attention. He managed to turn enough to see Carter’s blond head as she worked her way through the crush, using elbows and hands as required. Several of her victims yelped in pain before squashing themselves against their fellows to give her passage.