It will feed those worthy of survival.
It made sense.
The thought had come unbidden, and Janet tried to push it away, knowing it wasn't hers, couldn't be hers. But the others had to survive. Survival was important. Survival meant lives saved. She was a doctor. She saved lives. She was saving lives.
Very good. You are beginning to understand. I am proud of you.
She could feel it. It felt warm, soothing, soft like a down blanket, and it somehow eased the terrible coldness of the lab. The need to hang on to the feeling became overwhelming. That and saving lives. No time to lose. She moved on to the next tube, found the crystal that would trigger the aging process, pushed it deep into its socket.
The clone inside the tube began to alter, decaying before her eyes, silently and rapidly. All of a sudden she was trapped in a flutter of a memory. She'd seen this before. The face in front of her was overlaid by another, familiar somehow. The process then had been slower, not as efficient, and it had enabled her to win that race against time. She'd found out how this worked. Or something very much like it. Nanites?
Somewhere inside her mind Nirrti gave a chuckle of surprise, and the sensation was pleasant. She also sensed something else, swirling red and violent and entirely unashamed of its greed. Nirrti wanted him. The other one. The one familiar, the one who hadn't died.
It seems I am indebted to you. It would have been such a waste, and I have plans for him.
"It was none of my merit. The process was flawed." There was something else, Janet recalled. Someone else. Someone who'd helped. But she didn't mention it. If she did, the glow of pleasure surrounding her might diminish and she couldn't bear that. It was too cold to risk that little bit of warmth.
Luckily, Nirrti didn't seem to have noticed, still preoccupied with the revelation. A wave of scorn trawled through Janet's awareness.
The process was flawed indeed. Pelops was a fool who accepted boundaries without testing them. His method took a hundred days to induce death of old age, and he was happy with it. I can gestate life in hours, destroy it in minutes.
"You are a goddess, Lady Nirrti." Janet hadn't meant to say it, but in retrospect there didn't seem to be a reason why she shouldn't. It was true, after all, wasn't it?
Laughter flooded her mind, not the mocking onslaught she had learned to dread but a more intense burst of the delight she'd sensed earlier. Then it gradually ebbed and flattened, until Janet was alone again. Alone but not unobserved. She knew that now. The goddess was all-seeing.
Another tube, another crystal activated, another clone shriveled and died. Gestate life in hours, destroy it in minutes. Janet smiled. She was aiding the goddess.
From far down the endless row of tubes came the dry scrape of a door sliding open. She ignored it, not permitting herself to be distracted. Footsteps approached, halting and diffident, and finally slowed to a stop behind her. When she turned at last, she found herself facing the... What was he? Father, brother, alter ego-all of the above-to the things she was ordered to obliterate?
It appeared to perturb him. Pale as death, he watched himselfwizen until he was ancient beyond recognition and incapable of sustaining life. In a flash she understood that this was the fate that awaited those who displeased Lady Nirrti; they died a hundred deaths.
The freezing air in the lab became more tangible again and seeped into Janet's bones. Shivering, she crossed her arms, hugged herself "What do you want?" she asked, if only so as not to think the unthinkable any longer.
"Lady Nirrti wishes to see you," he hissed, his voice harsh with a hatred that begged for punishment.
"Will you take me to her? I don't know where she is."
"The Jaffa"-the word dripped boundless rancor-"waiting by the door will take you." His gaze rose at last, edged to the nearest tube and its contents, arrested there. "According to her I'm the one who has made them deficient, so I've been ordered to finish this task."
The giggle broke free without her volition, but she made no attempt to stifle it. The irony of the punishment was sublime, biblical even. And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out. The offender commanded to eradicate himself.
She giggled again, turned, and quickly walked along now empty tubes and toward the door. The instant it slid open, she was wrapped in deliciously warm, moist air. As promised, two Jaffa were waiting for her, the same clones she had found so abhorrent earlier. She couldn't remember why now. They were quite beautiful, tall and broad-shouldered and dark-haired, with deep green eyes. Lady Nirrti was right. You couldn't have too many of a good thing. Janet burst out laughing.
Tentatively at first, then more boldly, she stroked the chest of one of the men and suddenly realized that she had been too wrapped up in work and caring for her daughter to-
She had no daughter. She'd never had a daughter. She'd stolen an alien child, the rightful property of Lady Nirrti, and had withheld that child and- A sequence of images flashed through her mind, one more vile than the other, until her whole body tingled with shame. The cold seemed to creep back, and she grasped that it had nothing to do with the temperatures in the lab. It was inside of her, a legacy of her transgression.
Trying to control a shudder, she nodded at the Jaffa. "Let's go. Lady Nirrti is waiting."
They led her down into the vault. From there, the ring transporter took her to the roof of the building; a terrace high above the jungle. Below stretched an endless sea of green, bleeding into a scarlet sky. A huge sun was setting, cupping half the horizon, and now and again brilliantly colored birds burst from the canopy as if to take one last look before dusk fell.
"Pretty, is it not?"
Janet spun around, again aware of the icy lump of guilt within her. She dropped to her knees. "Lady Nirrti, I-"
"Quiet." Under a red and gold sunshade fluttering gently in the breeze stood the goddess, looking at her sternly but not unkindly. Willing to forgive? "You wish for my forgiveness, yes? You wish to prove yourself to me?"
"Yes, Lady Nirrti. I beg you." Janet was shaking with cold, felt tears streaming down her face. "Please," she whispered.
The goddess moved toward her, touched her shoulder. Under the heat of Lady Nirrti's touch, the ice began to melt at last. Radiant warmth spread from her hands, burning and soothing at once. "Rise, child. What is your name?"
"I have no name, mistress. You haven't seen fit to bestow one on me yet." The answer pleased the goddess; she could tell from the warmth leaking into her, and she rose toward its source like a flower toward the sun.
A delicate hand, framed by a ribbon device, cupped her face. "I shall name you." Lady Nirrti smiled. "You shall be called Mrityu, my daughter."
She rolled the sounds through her mouth and mind and decided they tasted good. Strong. "Thank you, mistress," whispered Mrityu. "But I still wish to prove myself to you."
"You shall. Oh, you shall." Lady Nirrti's laughter danced on the evening air like sparks of light and sunshine. "Come with me. I will show you your task." The goddess led the way under the sunshade, casually flicking a hand at the mounds of silk-covered cushions strewn across the stone floor. "Sit."
Despite the invitation, it struck Mrityu as disrespectful to seek her own comfort before the goddess was seated. So she waited until Lady Nirrti had settled on a pillow and only then sat down herself. "Please show me, mistress."
A recess in the floor released a dull gray orb, which slowly ascended until it hovered at Mrityu's eyelevel. She recognized the device; a communication globe. The grayness under its surface began to boil and swirled apart on the image of two people, a man and a woman. The woman was injured, and the man was attending to her.
"Do you remember them?" asked the goddess.
Somewhere beneath the warm mists that filled Mrityu's mind a memory stirred, faint and shapeless. "I do... I think."
"Good. You are to bring them to me."
Character Displacement: Artificial divergence of characters in related species whose territories overlap.
&
nbsp; f you thought about it, the method of lighting was ingenious, not to mention environmentally friendly. Nothing necessarily new-archeologists had hit upon the same trick sometime in the late eighteen hundreds -but this had to be older by several centuries, perhaps millennia. While his fingertips stroked the shiny silver disk, Dr. Jackson studiously avoided actually looking into it. His reflection was a bit of a shocker right now. Besides, the principle of the thing was far more interesting. There were dozens and dozens of these mirrors mounted in strategic places and refracting the surface light all throughout the maze beneath the ruins.
"Daniel!"
He whirled around, blinking into the gloom behind him. It'd been growing steadily dimmer for a while now, which meant that it had to be late afternoon at least, perhaps evening already. They'd left the wardroom two hours ago, and he'd been on point ever since-a classic case of the blind leading the maimed. Or, as Jack had put it, Daniel might not be able to see where he the hell was going, but at least he could run there if necessary.
At the end of the corridor, two blurry figures emerged from the shadows; Jack all but carrying Sam, and never mind that it had to be murder on his ribs. "Daniel!" he called again. "Wait up!"
"I can go faster, sir," Sam chimed in immediately.
"I don't recall anybody asking your opinion, Carter."
"Sony, sir."
Daniel could hear the forced cheeriness in her voice, didn't like it. She was holding on too hard, wasting strength she didn't have on reassuring him, herself, and first and foremost Jack. Who, by Daniel's estimate, was about nine tenths along the way of blaming himself for the entropy of the known universe.
At least he'd agreed to scrapping Plan A, which had been Jack going off on his own to find a sarcophagus that might not even exist or, if it did exist, might be on the other side of this godforsaken planet, while Daniel and Sam sat tight in the wardroom. The prospect of getting killed and/or eaten in the process hadn't seemed to deter him-there was a surprise! -but what had clinched the argument in the end was the question of whether Sam would still be mobile if he had to come all the way back and then take her to wherever that hypothetical sarcophagus lived.
"Any sign of the exit yet?" he asked when they caught up.
"Can't be far now. Up there." Daniel jerked his chin at a flight of stairs twenty yards down the corridor. "We're definitely on or near the upper levels. See how the halls are wider and more ornate? A floor down they didn't have those wooden pillars either, so-"
"Daniel."
"Sorry."
"Just... just get us to where we're going, okay?"
Daniel bit back the obvious reply; namely that he didn't have a clue where they were going. Or that the odds of his spotting an inscription saying Sarcophagus This Way with a little arrow underneath were negligible. Instead he simply nodded, turned around, and headed for the stairs, trying not to feel like Gandalf in the Mines of Moria. Everyone knew how that story went; Gandalf, consumed by a fire demon, ascends to a higher plane of existence. Not just yet, thanks all the same.
Halfway up Daniel realized that the quality of the light had changed to something more... immediate, for want of a better word. And it was brighter, not by much but enough to be noticeable. Instinct and habit made him want to run up the steps. He curbed the impulse and checked his six.
"Keep moving! We're okay."
Jack's definition of okay had to be the most elastic of any word in the history of linguistics, but now probably wasn't the time to discuss it. Daniel kept moving, as ordered. About to crest the top of the steps he slowed, listening past the soft shuffles and gasps on the stairwell behind him. It was quiet, no voices, no noises of any kind. Suddenly something brushed his face. He recoiled, winced in embarrassment a second later. A draft. Seemed his nerves were stretched a little more taut than he liked to admit.
The draft picked up, turned into a breeze, warm and heavy with the scent of flowers. He inched out into a vast room. Like everywhere else, it was decaying; wooden carvings rotting in humid air, friezes suffocating under lichen and creepers, masonry crumbling and inviting in its own destruction. Still, you could tell that the room-maybe a covered market-would have been grand once. And in one respect it was very different from the endless succession of chambers they'd passed since leaving the wardroom.
"Looks like a parking lot," offered Jack, lifting Sam over the last couple of steps. "Where do I pay?"
"At the exit." Pointing across the room, Daniel grinned.
One wall was missing, replaced by a row of wooden pillars. Between them, sunlight splashed onto marble tiles, painting the floor a deep red. Past the pillars, grass and foliage and the gray frontage of the buildings opposite.
"Cool. Now where?" Jack asked.
Daniel gave a small shrug. "If they built this along the same lines as the temples in Angkor, the center of the complex is right at the top of the mountain. So we keep going up."
"Fine."
"Sir, this is pointless," Sam murmured, eyes closed, propped up between that staff weapon and Jack's arm around her waist. All pretense at reassurance gone, she sounded like she didn't care anymore. Like it didn't matter anymore. "You can't-"
"You're tired, Carter." Jack didn't look at her when he said it. "We'll check what's up the road there and then take a break."
His tone, as falsely upbeat as Sam's had been earlier, precluded any argument. Daniel took it as a command to move out, started walking again, through the market hall and out into the open.
It was more than a temple precinct, he thought, desperate for something, anything, to distract himself. This had been a city once. The so-called road was a narrow stretch of lawn lined with statues, and it branched out into numerous smaller side streets. The roofs peaked into a myriad spires and pagodas, and above them rose the canopy of the forest and a lavender evening sky. Birdcalls here and there, and an overwhelming sensation of peace he'd known to be deceptive ever since he and Jack had discovered the mangled corpse on the temple wall. Still, it would do for now. There even was the far-off whisper of a waterfall, just to up the Zen factor.
As they drew closer to the massive structure at the top of the grass road, the whisper gradually turned into splashing. The road funneled into what might have been an audience hall. Soaring ceilings, tall columns, more statues, and at the far end some kind of dais that would have held an altar or throne. Opposite the dais, pink light streamed in through an archway screened by a cascade of water. Daniel had found his waterfall.
"Might as well rest here," Jack announced and steered Sam over into a corner that would cover their backs while still allowing a clear view of almost the entire room. Once there, he carefully eased her to the ground and nodded at the staff weapon. "Mind if I borrow this, just in case? I'm gonna go find some fire wood. Your teeth are rattling."
"Sir-"
"Thanks, Carter." He picked up the staff and rose. "Daniel, stay with her. If I'm not back in thirty, clear out and find that goddamn sarcophagus."
Daniel watched him disappear among the pillars and turned to Sam. She was beyond pale, and fever and exhaustion had punched olive smudges under eyes that looked too big for her face. "On a scale of one to ten, how bad is it?"
"Twelve point three," she rasped, tried to shift to a position that didn't hurt and eventually gave up. "You've got to talk to him, Daniel."
"I've got to talk to him? What makes you think he'll listen? He hasn't listened to you, has he?" Daniel squatted and offered Sam his canteen. She took it, drank greedily, handed it back.
"Thanks. And no, he hasn't. Last time I tried, he started talking about hockey and some highly involved maneuver he called a fishhook. I lost track after the third preparatory pass."
It coaxed a chuckle from Daniel. "I can explain it to you if you're interested. Side-effect of watching one too many hockey games with Jack." His amusement faded, as if evaporating in the jungle heat. "Right now he's about as amenable to reason as Colonel Kurtz. Actually, I don't think I've ever seen him like th
is."
"I have," Sam said quietly.
Daniel shot her a sharp look. He couldn't be sure because he hadn't been there, but he could guess, and he suddenly understood the origins of his own certainty that he wouldn't die out here as long as Jack was around. Jack would flatly refuse to let him die. Of course, there were limits even to Jack's powers of refusal. Right now Daniel was staring at one of them.
Sam had unwrapped the bandage to reveal a wound looking twice as bad as it had a few hours ago. Around the edges blisters had formed, filled with brownish fluid, and she inspected them, sick fascination on her face. "I guess that clinches it," she muttered, one finger carefully pressing down on the swollen tissue. Gas escaped, crackling softly, and she flinched. "Think he'd listen to that?"
With sudden determination, she angled for her backpack, fished out the medikit, removed an ampoule of morphine and a syringe.
"Sam, what are you doing?"
By ways of an answer, she snapped the top off the ampoule, dipped in the needle, pulled back the plunger, popped the cap back over the needle and dropped the syringe in her lap. Then she fumbled for her belt, dragged it from the loops, and cinched it around her thigh.
Finally, she gazed up at him. "I could do with a hand, Daniel. For starters, that tourniquet's nowhere near tight enough."
The sudden lump in his throat got in the way of replying. Of course she was right. Thirty seconds ago he'd have said it was the only sensible thing to do. But being faced with it somehow put a different complexion on the issue. He could hear the wails of a child on Abydos, and his stomach flipped. "Sam, are you absolutely sure?" he croaked. All of a sudden Jack's crazy notion of looking for a sarcophagus seemed entirely logical. "What if... What about your career?"
God, Jackson! You're really clutching at straws, aren't you?
"Medical separation. Are you going to help me or what?" She cocked her head, studied him for a moment. "Look, Daniel, I know this isn't fair. But I don't want the Colonel to have to do it."
Stargate SG-1: Survival of the Fittest: SG1-7 Page 18
