04 - The Morpheus Factor

by Ashley McConnell - (ebook by Undead)

For some reason, the staff wouldn’t work. It felt heavy and clumsy. He reached for the zat gun and got the same result. The weapons were useless here, whether it was the water, the weapons themselves, or some other reason. He shook his head at Vair, dropped the gun, and dived toward the octopus, which was still floating serenely in the water, beak open, as if waiting for a cue to crunch. Vair squawked in protest or in disappointment—an interesting phenomenon underwater. He could feel rage from the alien, an almost overwhelming fury and urge to obliterate utterly the octopus and all its kind.

  The next moment man and alien were standing in the middle of a desert, as dry as if they’d never been near a body of water in their lives, much less swimming through a battle in a coral sea.

  It was oddly familiar too—nothing like the odd vegetation of P4V-837. He turned in place slowly, scanning the expanse of pale sand interrupted by patches of spiky grass and the occasional clump of prickly pear. That spray of fernlike stalks topped with tiny yellow flowers was flixweed. And that flicker of movement was a blue-tailed lizard taking shelter under a clump of Russian thistle.

  The horizon was lumpy and uneven, as if someone had heaped up piles of mud in the distant past and then allowed them to slump down, almost but not quite returning to their original smooth surface. A ridge of hills made of sterner stuff jutted out baldly to the west, and he could just see a perfectly circular depression in the ground, perhaps a thousand yards wide, not far from its base.

  It was the depression that tipped him off—that and the lizard of course. He’d seen shallow depressions or others like it before, flying Red Flag and Green Flag exercises on the Nellis Bombing and Gunnery Range in Nevada, where all the hotshot Air Force pilots played war simulations and dared each other to do—a small, reminiscent smile crossed his face—really, really stupid stunts. Flying over the Nevada Test Site, he’d seen quite a few of those perfectly circular pits in the earth. They looked as if some mad giant had punched upward from underneath the ground and then pulled back really fast, letting the earth collapse on itself.

  Which in a sense was exactly what had happened.

  He blinked, and then he was standing at the bottom of a skeletal tower a hundred feet high. Next to him, a crane was lifting a large metal object upward. A crew of men stood nearby, watching anxiously. They didn’t appear to see either O’Neill or his companion. Vair seemed to think the crane was fascinating, but his interest shifted to O’Neill when he realized the colonel couldn’t care less about the moving machinery.

  O’Neill recognized the object and the tower, and he knew where he was and that he was dreaming. He had to be. Nobody would let unauthorized personnel just stand around watching this.

  Besides, this was—They didn’t do this anymore. They hadn’t done this for decades. This was like watching ancient history or a story from someone’s memories of long ago.

  The object was at least eight feet long, shaped like an extremely fat gray cigar. He could see the seams where the two ends had been welded together. He could hear the clanking of the heavy chains that raised it to the cradle, even though he couldn’t quite distinguish the words that the observers yelled to the crane operator. The half dozen men at the foot of the tower, giving the crane operator his directions, were all wearing hard hats and sunglasses, white cotton shirts open at the throat, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. One man was still wearing a tie, though the knot had been loosened to halfway down his chest. He could see the drops of sweat on their foreheads beneath the rims of the hard hats, the shine of it on their chins. Not all the sweat was from the heat, he thought. It was early yet for it to be that hot.

  The steel cigar swung alarmingly as the crane shifted position, and a thin whistle of apprehension came from one of the observers. Another laughed without humor and made some remark. No one responded.

  The crew around the tower didn’t notice O’Neill or his alien companion watching them from only a few feet away.

  Or rather, O’Neill watched them; Vair, on the other hand, was watching O’Neill with a curious intensity.

  There were wires coming off one end of the metal cigar, running down to the ground and off into the distance. The thing was inert so long as the wires weren’t hot: just a lump of elements processed and polished and put together by the busy minds of men.

  The cigar settled into a cradle at the top of the tower, and suddenly the crane and its operator were gone, the observers had vanished, and he could feel a cold chill running down his spine. They were standing at the foot of the tower, within touching distance of one of the metal supporting struts. He could see the rime of white, salty sand where someone had rested a sweating hand. The shadow of the massive metal shape above them fell across them, cooling them as only shadow in desert sunlight could do. They were alone with the tower, and he knew what that meant.

  He desperately did not want to be here, not even in a dream. Vair was still watching him, occasionally looking up at the metal bulb above them. O’Neill turned away, wanting to run, knowing that it would do absolutely no good, and finally he could hear words clearly: Five. Four. Three. Two. One—

  He was in the site observation and control room with the test crew. Why were there windows? There shouldn’t be windows—

  First the light, brighter than any words could describe, bright enough to let the blind see. Then the sound, an endless roar, and the impact of air displaced by a power too abrupt to comprehend.

  The control room shattered, and so did he.

  Ahhh, the watchers sighed.

  Wooden claws made a peculiar sound, clacking against raw stone. Daniel Jackson looked up to see Anubis pawing at a painted image. A door swung open, and the wooden dog turned, panting happily, to look at him.

  He was meant to follow. Of course.

  Around him the sound of chanting and the scent of myrrh—no, that wasn’t myrrh, it was some other incense—permeated the air, surging softly against his face as if moved by giant ostrich-feather fans. Before him Anubis trotted on, looking back expectantly every so often to make sure that Daniel was still with him.

  Abruptly he found himself standing on one end of a narrow bridge. He reached for side rails and found nothing. He looked down and saw a dark stream, and sitting within it, directly under the bridge, a creature with the long jaws and jagged teeth of a crocodile, the body of a lion, and the hindquarters of a hippopotamus. Am-Mit, the Devourer of Souls. It was waiting for him to slip and fall.

  Really, it made the Three Billy Goats Gruff look sad.

  The creature looked up at him, grinned, and licked its lips. He swallowed hard. The creature continued to stare at him, its jaws parted in a grin, a line of saliva dripping from the corner of its mouth. Its eyes were round and yellow and had no depth at all.

  He pulled himself away from its gaze with a jerk and tried to turn around, get back to safe ground. But there wasn’t any safe ground anymore; there wasn’t anything behind him but shadows moving in darkness. The ground was gone.

  In front of him stretched the narrow bridge, and on the other side, waiting even as the creature below waited, was a figure that looked like a man, but had the long, sharp curved beak of an ibis. He held scrolls of papyrus and an ancient pen in his hands, and stood next to a giant balance, two suspended bowls hanging from a T-bar.

  In one of the bowls rested, ever so delicately, a large white feather. Its weight did not disturb the evenness of the balance in the least.

  The wooden dog rose up on its hind legs and took on the body of a man, while retaining the shiny lacquered head of a jackal. “I bring you the Osiris Daniel,” Anubis said to the ibis-headed man. “His heart is righteous, and it shall be weighed and shall not be found wanting. He has not sinned against any god or any goddess. I charge you to weigh him truly and all his deeds.”

  “Ma’at,” Daniel whispered. The feather of truth against which the heart of a man was weighed to determine whether he would be thrown to the eager drooling jaws of Am-Mit or be permitted to live forever—he was in the middl
e of the Book of the Dead. The upright Anubis, then, was Upuaut, the Opener of the Ways. He would watch the scales to make sure that the heart was weighed fairly.

  Movement behind the ibis-headed man—who could only be Thoth, the god of wisdom, lord of the Balance—attracted his attention. According to the text, this should be Osiris himself, lord of the dead, protector and judge, who lent his name to the dead who were brought before him. Osiris was one of the greatest of the Egyptian gods, perhaps the greatest of all. Jackson peered eagerly into the mists beyond the scales.

  It was not Osiris, but Apophis who stood there—Apophis and Ra and all the other Goa’uld who had stolen Egyptian mythology. They were standing ankle deep in a shallow, wide pool of squirming dead-white Goa’uld larvae, waiting for him.

  Thoth unrolled one of the scrolls, and from the ibis head came a human voice.

  “Recite the laws of the gods and goddesses, and what you have done in your life that makes you worthy.”

  Revolted, he tried to step back, but Thoth was there, waiting.

  Unbidden, words rose to his lips, words he had read the first time in translation as a child at his father’s knee and at least once a year thereafter. They exerted a fascination that was, quite literally, timeless: thousands of years old and as true now as they ever had been:

  What manner of land is this to which I have come? It has not water, nor air; it is depth unfathomable. It is black as the blackest night, and men wander lost and helpless. In it a man cannot live in quietness of heart; nor may the longings of love be satisfied. But let the state of the eternal be given unto me instead of water and air and the satisfying of the longings of love, and let quietness of heart be given unto me instead of cakes and ale.

  Sha’re, he thought, despairing. The longings for that love would never be satisfied. The Book of the Dead described the bewilderment of the ka-soul in that empty place between life and life again while it waited to be judged by Thoth, the heart weighed against the feather of Truth.

  He could not remember all the names of all the gods, the litany of all the sins he was supposed not to have committed during his life. There was something about not stealing bread either from children or from the gods, not stirring up strife or conspiring against the pharaoh, not cursing or lying. He wasn’t in the habit of terrorizing the innocent, but if Apophis was the pharaoh, then he was doomed for all eternity.

  Seeing his hesitation, Thoth reached out and into him, sinking his immortal hand into Daniel’s very flesh to open his side and remove his still beating heart to weigh it against the white feather.

  And behind him, Apophis waited, smiling, and the larvae writhed and surged around him.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Daniel woke abruptly, shaking, moving from supine to upright in a single lunge. He felt frantically at his side. There was, of course, no wound, no gaping hole from which his heart had been extracted. The harsh sound of his panting slowed, and he swallowed, trying to work some moisture back into his mouth. Apophis was dead. How many times did he have to convince himself of that?

  The rest of the team was sprawled asleep around him in the midst of debris from the meal the aliens had brought. The Kayeechi themselves had vanished, taking with them their weapons, but he could see Teal’C’ staff lying at his side, and the sidearms and rifles were still exactly where they belonged. Everything was quiet; he could hear insects and the sound of the breeze in the trees, the heavy breathing of his teammates, but nothing else. Still shaken by the vivid dream, he took a couple of deep breaths and nearly choked on the scent of smouldering incense. In search of some fresh air, he stepped carefully around the others and stepped outside the circle of ceremonial incense toward the mouth of the cave.

  His path took him straight through the middle of the little glen where they had eaten with the Kayeechi—or it should have. As soon as he left the cave, he found himself walking on a beach, the white sand crunching under his feet, seagulls squabbling in the air overhead, the smell of salt strong in his nostrils. The sun was hot on his fair skin. He stopped dead. “‘And that was odd,’” he quoted softly to himself, “‘for it was the middle of the night.’”

  This place did seem rather like something out of Alice in Wonderland. He looked behind him, but the cave and his sleeping companions were gone.

  “I must still be asleep,” he said and then wondered how he could be asleep and talking to himself about it. He shrugged. Dreams weren’t supposed to be rational. This one seemed even “realer,” if possible, than the last one, walking through a tomb, reading the wall paintings, actually experiencing—He shook his head abruptly. This world was just odd. He was beginning to think that O’Neill’s usual paranoia about such things really was appropriate here, although that raised another interesting question. Why were they still here? As soon as the team realized that they weren’t all seeing the same things, O’Neill should have pulled them out. If you couldn’t trust your own eyes—or the eyes of the person guarding your back—you shouldn’t be hanging around. Period. Even with the lure of a warehouse full of Goa’uld weapons somewhere nearby, it wasn’t worth it.

  Yet here they were, still, eating and drinking like starving Persephones. And sleeping. He supposed Persephone slept during her visits to Hades. He wondered if she dreamed.

  He stepped out, enjoying the feel of the sand and the sun. If nothing else, this particular delusion was providing some decent exercise. He wondered how far he was from the cave. He wondered if he had ever left it at all.

  Whether he had or not, at the moment he was standing on a beach, with an ocean on his left and a tropical forest on his right, and a bright white stretch of beach in front of him. As he watched a wave recede, he could see some tiny form of sea life burrowing madly into the sand, making a V shape in the retreating water.

  He was definitely going to tell Jack they ought to leave this nuthouse of a world as fast as possible. It was fascinating, sure, and he had never had such vivid dreams, but there was just something wrong here.

  The sound of the sea to his left got louder, as if the waves were becoming more insistent. Pausing, he shaded his eyes with one hand to see better. There was definitely something going on up there. It was a woman, and she was naked. Was it Sha’re?

  For a moment hope and vision blurred, and he saw the olive skin and lustrous black hair of his late wife, the passion of his life. She was standing only a hundred meters away, facing him, her arms lifted, waiting for him.

  He began to run.

  The image blurred sharply, as if someone had changed a channel, and he stopped running. Everything was the same except—

  It was Carter.

  And she wasn’t waiting for him with open arms. She was turned away, facing out to sea, and on one knee in a shooting position. She had a zat gun in her hand and was sighting along the barrel at something in the water, firing repeatedly, retreating in a backward scrabble and raising her angle of fire as she did so.

  He didn’t stop to wonder what Carter was doing on the beach nude. She was fighting something rising up out of the water, and whatever it was seemed about to overwhelm her. He shook himself. This had to be a dream.

  And if it was a dream, dammit, he liked the last version better. He blinked, trying to bring back the image of his wife.

  Once again the image blurred and shuddered, and for an instant, was Sha’re again, this time wearing a Hawaiian lei and sarong, crowned with flowers as she had been on the day he had married her, according to the customs of her people, although the lei and sarong hadn’t featured then. She’d worn the dress of her people, descended from Middle Eastern desert nomads—and the image blurred once more, and it was Carter again.

  And he could see the mountain of kraken looming over her.

  He bit the inside of his lower lip and tasted blood. And it hurt. He spat out a mouthful of reddened saliva and began running down the beach to help his teammate.

  As close as he came, Carter didn’t seem to hear him calling, even when he arrived at her side
. He could see red marks appearing on her skin where the Thing struck at her and connected, sending her sprawling across the sand. She reached up, her face twisted with rage and determination, and held out her hand, palm out; a ribbon of power lanced out at the creature, and it changed, solidified, grew into a mountain soaring impossibly high over their heads. As he watched, Carter was suddenly dressed in alpine gear, the ribbon weapon still wrapped around her heavy ski glove. He gazed up the slope to the lip of snow at the top of the mountain as its crest trembled, quivered, and shelved off in a massive avalanche thundering down at them.

  What is that? The human did not choose that weapon the last time.

  I can’t see what it is. It looks like something wrapped around her hand.

  Look closer. Make him look closer!

  He stepped back, away from the lash of the Goa’uld ribbon weapon and away from the avalanche—Carter was running away, still with no sign she knew he was there—when he found himself struggling for air, submerged in an undersea city with no idea how he’d gotten there or where the surface was. Instead of running along sand he was kicking frantically at water. There was no mountain, no avalanche, no Carter. He gasped and took in a lungful of fluid. Around him, he was dimly aware of movement, but the most important thing, the only thing at the moment, was getting air. His chest felt as if someone had fastened a vise around him and was squeezing it tighter and tighter, about to crush him from sheer pressure. He kept kicking, desperate to find the surface. He was getting dizzy from lack of air, beginning to hear voices in the thudding of the bubbles of air escaping from his lungs.

  What is he doing? He isn’t supposed to waken!

  He is in the midst of the Shaping, and I cannot control where he goes. I don’t understand—

  Etra’ain, if you cannot control him, let him walk. There was a weapon there we could have used to crush the Narrai and burn their nestlings. Are you growing weak? Do we need another Shaper?