The next morning, Frasier coached O’Neill on various exercises related to dreaming while the others reviewed their gear and prepared for possible permanent exile.
“Can you remember some of the characteristics of your usual dreams, Colonel?” she asked him as they sat in her office. He, at least, was rested. She was given to looking over her shoulder and jumping at shadows.
“Um.” He looked at her, his lips twitching. “Not that I’m inclined to share.”
She blushed a little. “I mean, can you recall something from a dream that struck you as so bizarre that it could only be a dream? It doesn’t have to be anything big. Some people report being in places they haven’t been for years, or—
“Coming to work naked?” he asked helpfully.
“That’s a common one.” She refused to let him fluster her. She was the doctor, dammit. “What I’m looking for is something that you can use to tell yourself you’re in a dream state. It could be anything: a cartoon watch or dress gloves that are the wrong color. We can’t practice here anymore, so it might help to decide ahead of time, if you can, on something to use as a personal cue. With the watch, for example, you could will it to change to a different kind. From Mickey Mouse to a diver’s watch, for instance.”
“But I like my Mickey Mouse watch,” he said gravely.
It was just her luck to have to deal with a bird colonel with a warped sense of humor. She gritted her teeth and went on. “Then change something else. Do you want to review reports of failed tests to get some ideas of how you can sabotage the Kayeechi’s potential bomb?”
“There’s that too, isn’t there?” he said thoughtfully. “I wonder if they wipe themselves out on their own world if they’ll just dream their way into ours.”
“Hammond would have our hides for rugs.”
He let his breath go. “Yeah, I think he would. Okay. Watches. Gloves. Bombs. Anything else we need?”
“Nose filters.” She began roaming around her office, stacking items on the desk between them. “The stimulator. Food?”
“Logistics will take care of that. Concentrates and water purifiers,” he told her. “How good are these filters of yours?”
“You could walk through a field of angry skunks and never notice,” she assured him and set several packs of the filters on the growing pile. “I think I want to take my own first-aid kit.”
“Good plan.”
“Look, Colonel, you do this all the time. I don’t. If you can be helpful, that’s fine, but—”
“Hey, hey, hey. It’s okay, Janet.” He was on his feet and next to her, not quite touching her. “Look, there’s no reason why you have to go. Show Carter how to work the stimulator. We might have to be trapped there, but you don’t.”
She looked up at him, touched by the concern in his dark eyes. “I’m not afraid of the assignment, Colonel. And I can’t teach Carter how to operate this well enough to be sure she might not accidentally burn your brain out. I have to go. It’s my job, just like it’s your job.”
He hesitated, then seemed to realize how close he was standing to her and stepped back, creating more room between them. “AH right,” he said at last. “How about I get out of your way and look for some of those reports you mentioned. We’ll meet in the Gate room in three hours.”
“That will be fine, Colonel.” She watched him leave the office and told herself it was a good thing he wasn’t underfoot while she was trying to pack. It wasn’t quite convincing, even to herself.
* * *
The Council of the Kayeechi—Those Who Shape—huddled under the feast canopy, ignoring the thin wails from their prisoner. It was raining, a steady drumbeat of heavy drops, and the thatch of the canopy did only an adequate job of sheltering them. Every so often the weight of water on a low place in the covering overcame the woven vegetation, and a small splash and the annoyed exclamation of a Councillor indicated that there was yet another hole.
There was no energy left in them to Shape the canopy’s integrity. The eight of them moved out of the way of the leaks and stared at each other, waiting.
They were waiting none too patiently for Vair.
“I still think,” Shasee said with an air of having repeated herself too many times, “we should try to talk to them. It was a mistake, after all.”
Eleb snorted, but it was Etra’ain who remarked acidly, “There was no mistake. We were eager for the feasting, all of us. If I remember aright, you were among the first to praise Vair’s courage and cunning when he came back that first time.”
“But we didn’t know they were people,” Shasee protested. “If we had known—”
“Vair knew. He could not have watched them so long in order to find a nest unguarded without knowing. And when he came back, his patterns still sticky with yolk, telling the heroic tale of battling Narrai from the middle of their own nest”—Etra’ain’s voice was especially sarcastic now—“you sang his praises.”
“So did you,” Shasee whispered. “Everyone did.”
“I was hungry. We were all hungry. We were starving. And he had come back with the biggest egg any of us had ever seen.”
There was another anguished wail from the cage. A claw came out, waving helplessly, and knocked aside some of the more useless debris from the last Shaping. The Council ignored it.
“That egg was already going bad anyway,” Eleb muttered. “It wasn’t that good.”
“The next one was,” someone else piped up. “I liked it.”
“So where is our intrepid hero now?” Etra’ain snarled. “These Earth people will be another Narrai, I think.”
“At least we haven’t eaten any of them yet,” Eleb pointed out.
“They had strong dreams,” Shasee, ever the optimist, said. “Very strong. There was great power.”
Etra’ain shook raindrops out of her hair. “Which we could not walk in long enough to use. Useless! Where is Vair?”
“Here,” said Vair. His red fur was dry, except where the canopy drips had caught him and, in one place, where the regular patterns and lines had been interrupted by a patch of naked blood. Shasee and others murmured in shock and sympathy. Vair pretended to ignore them. “And I have good news. We have another chance. They’re worried about us. They’re coming back. And this time I can control the Tall One. I have walked in his mind and stepped outside it. Even you have not done such a thing, Etra’ain.”
Etra’ain snorted. “You have no idea what I have done or can do, Vair. As for controlling the Tall One’s dreams—show us and we will believe you.”
“All right,” Vair responded defiantly. “I will.”
No matter how many times you heard about it or even experienced it, Janet Frasier thought, going through the Stargate had to be a shock to the system. As she stumbled out the other end, only to be caught and held up—and placed gently back on her feet—by Teal’C, she made a mental note to do more studies on the cumulative effect of wormhole travel. At some point, surely, the human body had to give up on this freezing-thawing cycle?
Frasier herself, as well as all the members of SG-1, wore discreet nose filters guaranteed to block anything larger than a microvirus. They should certainly be effective against pollen and smoke, she’d assured the team. Daniel Jackson was pinching at his nose as if expecting to sneeze, but the sneeze never came. She looked around, fascinated, and was surprised to see the team doing exactly the same thing.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, once her teeth stopped chattering.
“That was where we saw the trees moving,” Carter informed her. “It didn’t look anything like this the first time.” The major pointed to a mountain that rose up less than half a mile away, evidently the product of a massive geologic fault slip. “That mountain wasn’t there. And it looks like they’ve had a bad fire season in the last forty-eight hours.” The slope rising to the foothills was blackened in places, and the few stubby trees were charred and bare.
“The roc was over there,” Jackson added, looking a few de
grees off the direction of the mountains. “Came in from that direction to grapple with a tree.” He paused. “We must have been in someone else’s dream at the time and not even realized it. Just stepped out of the Gate and right into the middle of it.”
That’s impossible, Janet thought, but wisely kept her mouth shut.
“There are smudge pots set around the Gate,”
Teal’C noted. “They appear similar to the ones used in the eating areas.”
“I wonder if that’s what I thought was the smell of flowers blooming the last time,” O’Neill remarked, pivoting in place to scan the horizon. At least the DHD was still there. “Or if maybe they’re hoping we’d be back.”
“Or someone would be back anyway.” Daniel was peering up into the sky, shielding his eyes from the sun, apparently trying to identify something that was ducking through a collection of white puffy clouds.
Frasier nodded. From the descriptions the team had given her, she’d expected this world to be a pleasant place. And it was, if you discounted the evidence of repeated forest and grass fires and the flying creatures circling above like vultures on her own planet. Sunny, warm—just like home. Even the burned-out area reminded her of home—Montana, say.
“The village, or whatever it was, was over there,” O’Neill said. “Since the welcoming committee is somewhere else at the moment, let’s go see what the place really looks like.”
“And keep your eyes peeled for bombs while we’re at it,” Jackson joked.
“Yeah, do that,” O’Neill echoed. He wasn’t joking at all.
They made their way through a burned-out patch of trees along the base of the cliffs, the raw charcoaled stumps sticking pointed fingers up into the sky. Beneath their feet dead vegetation crunched.
“What’s that?” Frasier asked at one point.
The team paused to look up at a bundle hanging from the remains of a branch. “I think that’s the enemy,” O’Neill said. “Or what’s left of one.”
“We’re not getting radiation readings, are we?” Carter asked, trying to keep a note of practicality in her voice.
“Not yet,” Jackson replied, examining a Geiger counter. It ticked softly, irregularly. “All I get is low counts, probably background radiation. So far, so good.”
“The Kayeechi approach,” Teal’C announced, speaking for the first time.
“Oh, how cute!” Frasier exclaimed. Diminutive and quick moving, they chattered to each other as they came closer, and her attention was caught by the various patterns and colors of hair on their visible skin.
Then she noticed what the cute little furry aliens were carrying in their three-fingered hands: Jaffa energy staffs, half size, and a few automatic rifles and sidearms, similarly downsized. “Uh, well—”
“That’s okay. General Hammond would have thought they were cute too,” Carter said in a low voice, “if Vair hadn’t sneaked up on him.”
The team stopped and waited, weapons ready, for Etra’ain and her escort to come to them. The two groups regarded each other warily.
“There’s Vair and Shasee,” Jackson informed Frasier. “The red and the gray ones. They were the ones we met first.”
“Vair? I thought you said Vair was—”
“I did,” O’Neill said grimly. “And no, I don’t know how he got back here. Or if he’s still back there too. I plan to find out.”
“Why have you returned?” Etra’ain called out. Her voice was thin across the intervening distance.
“Major, why don’t you tell them?” O’Neill said out of the corner of his mouth. “It isn’t my eyeliner.”
“Ritual religious object,” Carter corrected and moved a few feet toward the aliens. The rest of the team grouped itself behind her. She spread her hands in front of her body, showing them empty. The Kayeechi muttered. Behind her she could hear Jackson identifying the purple-furred one as the probable leader of the aliens.
“We have returned to recover an object we inadvertently left behind,” she said. “We’ve come a very long way. We know that there was anger between us when we left. We ask that you allow us to return to the cave where we slept to search for my… object.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see O’Neill making a production out of a yawn, stretching, doing his best to look like a man in need of a nap. “We don’t want to cause trouble,” she said. “Let us find this thing, and we will go peacefully on our way.”
The aliens huddled. They appeared to be arguing passionately, if the amount of gesticulation involved were any indication. Vair, she noted with interest, hung back from the discussion, staring at O’Neill and the rest of them. The other Kayeechi seemed to find this behavior uncharacteristic of him, judging by the looks they gave him as they argued. She was willing to bet that Vair hadn’t told anyone about his visit to the Complex—always assuming, of course, that this was the same Vair.
At last Etra’ain stepped out of the colorful group and approached Carter. “You are weary,” she said. “We understand that you are strangers and do not know our ways. We asked you for help, but perhaps we were importunate. Come and let us give you food and rest. Let us help you search. Be our guests once again.”
“You are very kind,” the major responded. Glancing at the armed escort, she added, “Could you ask them to point those things somewhere else? Straight up maybe?”
Etra’ain looked from Carter to Teal’C to her own people and then went back to engage in a hasty discussion. The result of this was that the energy staffs carried by her escort were vertical, though some were barrel end up and others barrel end down.
Either way, they weren’t pointed at SG-1. When the aliens moved into two groups, opening a path between them, and Etra’ain gestured, Carter said, “I guess that’s our cue, sir.”
They followed the aliens to a small clearing, where they paused as Vair, Shasee, Etra’ain, and the others stopped to sort themselves out. “This looks—to me anyway—like where we were before,” Jackson remarked. “The trees and park, I mean. Except there’s no city.”
There was indeed no city. Instead, they saw only a rough huddle of hide-and-thatch huts grouped in an irregular circle around a rectangular area shaded by a hide cover. Here, at least, there were no signs of wildfire. The vegetation looked yellowish, but that might be the bloom of health on this planet.
In the shaded area, the Kayeechi sat and talked to one another, worked industriously on hand weaving, or ate something yellow from shallow straw bowls. At one end of the shaded space, a pen made of stout saplings woven together with vines contained… something. A clawed limb occasionally poked through the bars, waved helplessly, and withdrew again. It seemed unable to grasp the bars.
“This has to be where we had the feast,” O’Neill said. “I don’t remember the cage though. Did any of you see it?”
The rest shook their heads. O’Neill had to force himself to look away from the bars. Those claws looked too much like a human hand might, grasping helplessly at something, anything that might be freedom. A chill of memory ran up his spine, and he shook himself. That claw was not a hand, most especially not his hand, and for all he knew, the thing might be nothing more than a giant pet canary. Or the cage could be the Kayeechi version of a hospital ward. Or—
“Uh-oh,” Carter remarked. “It looks like we’re in for round two of the ceremonial greetings.”
“Let’s see if we can skip the formalities this time.” O’Neill greeted the diversion with a sense of relief and forced himself to stop looking at the cage.
But the Kayeechi would not forgo the opportunity to make much of their guests. Once again, platters of food were brought out and spread under the shade of the primitive tarp. Etra’ain stood to welcome them in a short speech that failed to mention there had ever been a battle.
“Doctor, you and Daniel can sit down. Carter, Teal’C and I have religious reasons not to eat tonight,” O’Neill said.
Frasier was puzzled for an instant and then understood. She slid the pack off
her back with a stifled moan of relief, made sure that her own sidearm was conveniently to hand, and then sat down between two small aliens no taller than seven-year-old girls back home. She noted with relief that Jackson sat on the other side of the alien on her right, and the other three were positioned strategically at her back. All of the miniaturized weapons had been put away; apparently it was rude to eat and shoot. She refused to let that make her feel guilty about having her gun loose in its holster.
One of the large woven platters was set in front of her, and the alien to her right reached for a large red bulb of something and held it out to her.
“Think of it as an apple,” Jackson advised. “It was pretty good, as I recall. Of course,” he added thoughtfully, turning a similar object over in his hands, “my recall on this world isn’t the most trustworthy thing you’ve ever run into.”
“I wish I had one of those instant analyzers they have on science-fiction shows,” Frasier fretted, looking at the pots of incense being set unobtrusively around the eating area and the mounds of unidentified fruits and vegetables being presented to them. “I could sure use one right now. It would take me a lab full of equipment to tell what this stuff is.”
“Stick around,” O’Neill said from behind her with a gallows grin and an undertone. “I’ll see if I can dream one up for you.” He laughed. “There’s an advantage we didn’t think of, isn’t there?”
“Let’s not push our luck,” Frasier answered. She managed to take and store samples of nearly everything that was served to them in the steadfast belief that she would be able to analyze them eventually.
“Where’s Vair?” Jackson asked the alien between himself and Janet. It had a checkerboard pattern of brown lines, like perpendicular repeating eyebrows, all over its face. “Oh, Dr. Frasier, this is Eleb. We met the last time we were here.”
The brown-blocked alien grinned suddenly at her, showing sharp teeth. Frasier had to force herself to treat the grimace as a smile and return it as such.
04 - The Morpheus Factor Page 17
