The Furies

Chapter Twenty-three Original Sin

“I hate this,” Sam said to no one in particular. She’d been on her way down to the Hammond when the Eternal had landed, and she hadn’t been unhappy to be sidetracked by Teyla’s return. She hadn’t figured out quite what she’d say to Major Franklin.

Now, as the transport chamber doors opened again in the empty corridor, she figured she’d better work it out. Her crew was just starting to come together as a team, and now Franklin had to rock the boat. She was going to have to land on him like a ton of bricks. Being the disciplinarian didn’t come easy to her, but over the years she’d learned how to do it and this was one of the situations that called for it. She couldn’t afford the tensions within her crew this raised, and the last thing any of them could afford was a problem with Sheppard or the Atlantis expedition. Or, for that matter, with the Daedalus’ 302 wing. Thankfully, Lorne knew her and trusted her enough to bring it to her before it got out of hand.

The doors to the pier slid open ahead of her, and here was Franklin coming toward her. Which begged the question of waiting. Better to get it over with.

“Major Franklin,” she said. “Just the man I was looking for.”

“Ma’am?” Franklin looked surprised. That wasn’t her usual tone of voice. She sounded like she was channeling Jack. He could kick somebody’s butt between their ears in the most thorough way she’d ever seen without ever raising his voice.

“I understand you have a problem with Colonel Sheppard,” she said. Spit it out and see what he said.

“Ma’am?” He looked bewildered, not guilty. That was a good sign, if it was genuine.

“Telling stories on his record at the poker game last night.” She didn’t wait for him to deny it. That was a General Hammondism — if you know it’s true, never give them a chance to sidetrack the conversation onto how you know it. “I’m very disappointed in you, Major. That’s unprofessional. Digging up rumors seven or eight years old about the commander of the base you’re visiting and repeating them to his subordinates is absolutely out of bounds.”

“Um,” Franklin gulped. Ok, not guilt or hostility. Franklin could be a motor mouth. She’d already figured that out. Maybe this was nothing but that, gossip to make himself sound important when trying to fit in with people he didn’t know. But Hocken would read it as a threat, and Lorne as an attack on someone whose back he was watching.

“Sheppard is a fine man and a good officer,” Sam said. “Moreover, he’s the commander of this base, where we are guests. Guests do not muddy the water for their hosts. Is that clear?”

“Abundantly, ma’am,” Franklin said, drawing himself up. If she’d been him, her cheeks would have been flaming.

“Right now we are enjoying the full liberty of the city. It wouldn’t be very pleasant if the crew of the Hammond or any individual were to lose that liberty and have to stay aboard the ship for the remainder of our stay.” Atlantis’ mess served fresh food. They had unlimited showers and a full gym, movie nights and poker games and pick up basketball. Franklin being stuck aboard the Hammond for several weeks would be a pretty severe punishment. For the entire crew of the Hammond to be stuck aboard the ship because Franklin had insulted the base commander would make his life utter hell.

Not that Sheppard would do that. He wouldn’t punish the whole crew of the Hammond by placing the city off limits. But Franklin probably didn’t know Sheppard well enough to know that. And Sam would certainly require Franklin to stay aboard if she thought he was going to make trouble.

“Yes, ma’am.” Franklin’s voice was very precise. He saw the event horizon looming there too.

“I do not want to hear any further stories about you spreading old rumors,” Sam said. “Gossip is unprofessional, and doubly so when it reflects poorly on your ship and your command. I am sure this is the last of this incident.”

“It is, ma’am.” Franklin brought himself to attention.

“Good. Now go get a crew together to get the hull plates that Dr. Kusanagi will need for repairs tomorrow. Ask her which bay they’re stored and move them to the tarmac next to the Hammond. You’ll need the bobcat, because the plates are large and very heavy.” Franklin had probably been on his way to dinner, but it wouldn’t hurt him to wait a little while. A couple of hours’ work loading hull plates would serve as a reminder of how very unpleasant his life could become, but wouldn’t be severe enough to get his back up. That was the other thing she couldn’t afford. She needed a first officer who was on her team, who was 100 percent bought in. She could strangle him for making this necessary. But it also wasn’t the kind of thing she could afford to let pass.

“Yes, ma’am.” Franklin opened his mouth and shut it again, as though deciding what to say. “Ma’am, I want you to know that I don’t have anything personal against Colonel Sheppard. I barely knew him in Kandahar.”

“Good,” Sam said. “Then I’m certain we won’t need to speak of this again.”

Teyla dreamed, and in her dream she knew she was in Atlantis. She rose up from her bed and left John sleeping, left her rooms and walked the halls sleeplessly, through silent echoing corridors, past windows that opened on night.

She made her way to the control room, hearing even before she entered the comforting soft sounds of the machines, the voices of the duty crew. Chuck was at the ops board, and gave her a smile as she passed. The office door was open, and Teyla was unsurprised to hear Rodney, to see him pacing back and forth, explaining something to Elizabeth, who sat at her desk, her laptop open before her.

“Of course it’s a problem,” he said testily. “90 percent of the females died in the initial trials. But those who lived were more radically transformed than we anticipated. I don’t think we had any idea that we would be creating those kinds of mental powers, far beyond anything we have previously experienced.”

Teyla stood in the doorway, hesitating, but Elizabeth raised her eyes and beckoned to her. “Come in, Teyla,” she said. “This concerns you.”

“It’s a big problem,” Rodney said.

“The mortality rate?”

“No, no, no.” Rodney shook his head. “We knew that might be an issue.”

“What are you talking about?” Teyla asked, and thought she saw Elizabeth nod almost imperceptibly.

“What to do about the Asurans,” John said, slouching in the visitor’s chair.

“Michael,” Carson said, standing by the window, looking out into the gateroom below. “What do we do with Michael? We should never have begun this.”

“How else were you going to get this off my neck?” John asked, turning his head. The Iratus Bug was clamped on his throat, teeth in the vein.

“I think we’ve got a problem here,” Rodney said. He turned and looked at her, Elizabeth’s eyes following him. “We have to kill Osprey.”

“It’s too bad,” Carson said mildly.

“Yeah,” John said, and got to his feet in one swift move, leveling the P90 at her.

And then she was running, diving behind the control board as the shots followed her, rattling off the metal, throwing sparks from the Ancient systems. She was running and they were behind her, the gateroom floor dancing with tracer fire as she sprinted toward the open event horizon, John’s voice behind her, calling in Marine teams on the radio. She felt the bullets touch her, once, twice, but miraculously she was still on her feet, still running through the pain, plunging into the wormhole.

And out the other end.

She stood in the gatefield on Athos, and a low moon was setting behind scudding clouds. Across the water the ruined city rose cold and stark.

Elizabeth stood before the gate, lifted her chin. “Where are we?” she asked.

“Athos,” Teyla said, looking around. The wind whispered over the dry grass. “This is Gatefield. My mother was Tegan of Gatefield. My people came here in the spring each year of my life. We spent the winters in the valleys where the weather was less harsh, but we returned here every spring, to Gatefield and Emege That Was.” She looked at Elizabeth, her heart still pounding. Guides came but seldom in dreams, but she knew one when she saw it. And of course it would take the form of one she had known and trusted. “Elizabeth,” she said respectfully, “What is it I am supposed to know? What are you trying to tell me?”

“You already know,” Elizabeth said. “You have all the pieces, Teyla. You just have to put them together.”

“You will not tell me?” Teyla asked, though she did not expect an answer. If it were so simple, there would be no need of the rest of it.

“I can’t do that,” Elizabeth said, and Teyla thought she heard real regret in her voice. “But you have all the pieces now. It’s all there. You should ask Kate to help you put it together.”

“Kate is dead,” Teyla said, and her voice broke on it. “She is dead these two years.”

“Janus knew,” she said. “But he did not tell me. Perhaps he told Dr. Jackson. I don’t know. If so, he does not remember.”

“I do not know what you mean,” Teyla said. “Elizabeth, what use is there in asking people who are dead or who do not remember?”

“You remember,” Elizabeth said. “It’s in your blood, in your lineage. You remember. And you are free to act.”

“And you are not?” Teyla asked sharply, her head rising like a hunting dog’s.

Elizabeth shook her head. “Wake,” she said. “And remember.”

Eva Robinson had just put her cup of coffee down on her desk and switched on her monitor, ready to begin her day, when there was a soft knock on the door. She looked up and suppressed a shudder.

Teyla stood in the doorway, Teyla and not Teyla at the same time. She understood that the physical transformation into a Wraith queen was grueling, and of course it didn’t make any sense to undo it when presumably Dr. Keller would only have to redo it again in a few days, but it was still eerie. For now it seemed that a Wraith queen was walking freely around Atlantis.

It didn’t help that Teyla dressed the part, still wearing the black skirts and dark emerald bodice of the Wraith queen rather than her usual clothing. Maybe her regular clothes looked too strange on a Wraith. Maybe that was worse, or at least more confusing.

“Do you have a few moments?” Teyla asked politely.

“I have lots of moments,” Eva said, glancing down at the calendar up on her computer. “I have all the moments until 11 o’clock.” She shrugged. “I’m still not the most popular person in Atlantis.”

Teyla came in, her skirts whispering against the door as it closed behind her. She lifted her chin. “I would like to talk to you about my dreams. This is something that I would have brought to Kate.”

Eva smiled, picking up her coffee cup. It was snowing again, big moist white flakes swirling around the towers. “Come on in and sit down,” she said. “I can be a pretty good ear too.” She handed Teyla her coffee. “Can you hold this for me for a minute? I’m getting pretty good on the crutches, but I can’t handle them with a full cup of coffee yet.” Teyla took the cup and she pushed up, coming around the desk to one of the chairs by the window.

“I am happy to,” Teyla said, handing her cup to her once she was sitting and had arranged the crutches close at hand. She settled into the other chair, shaking her hair back from her face. “Elizabeth said I should bring this to Kate, and since I cannot, I bring it to you.”

Eva’s coffee grew cold in the cup while the story unfolded. At last Teyla sat with her hands in her lap, silent. “That’s pretty incredible,” she said.

“I do not expect you to believe that I have really spoken with Elizabeth,” Teyla said tightly.

Eva shrugged. “Why not? Many people have the experience of speaking with friends or loved ones who are dead.”

Teyla looked at her keenly with sharp golden eyes. “You are different,” she said.

“It takes a certain kind of arrogance to dismiss the experiences of thousands of other people because they don’t jibe with your personal beliefs,” Eva said. “I don’t know what happens after death. But I do know that many people have very profound experiences dreaming about or talking with the dead.” She put her coffee cup down. “It’s not my job to change people’s beliefs, Teyla. My job is to help people find solutions to their problems within the framework of their beliefs.”

“I am asking you,” Teyla said. “What do you think this is about?’

Eva sighed. “Well, at a glance the glib answer would be that you’re deeply disturbed by this masquerade. You find yourself identifying with the Wraith, and that makes you question your relationships with the people in your life.”

“I know that,” Teyla said. “Believe me, I am aware that I make people uncomfortable.”

“You would make people less uncomfortable if you wore your regular clothes,” Eva said. “And you don’t.”

Teyla smiled, and it was a Wraith queen’s smile. “Perhaps I think it is good for people to be a little uncomfortable. It makes them uncomfortable to see a Wraith as a person. It is always uncomfortable to see the enemy as people, and yet that is the truth of it.”

Eva nodded. “That’s a hard thing for people to do when they’re engaged in battle. There’s a school of thought that it’s one of the primary reasons for PTSD. It’s the people who have the strongest empathy, the people who are the most culturally flexible and have the strongest sense of responsibility for others who are the most vulnerable. They can’t turn it off. They can’t stop caring.”

“And yet they are the best ones,” Teyla said quietly, her eyes on the falling snow outside. “Who would want to entrust the lives of people to someone to whom they were nothing? I would not follow such a leader. Nor would I give responsibility to someone who did not feel the full weight of it.”

“There’s the bind,” Eva said. “Empathy and flexibility are important in a leader. And yet it’s those very qualities that mean that events cut them to pieces.” She reached for her cold coffee. Cold was better than none. “So they’ve got to have something firm to stand on. They need good skills and a supportive network to get through it. With the right kind of platform to stand on, people can thrive in the most difficult situations.” Her eyes met Teyla’s. “But you know that,” she said. “Coming from a world where everyone lives under that kind of shadow.”

“Yes,” Teyla said thoughtfully, “And no. Because there is no responsibility. The Wraith come, inevitable as weather, but also equally without fault. No one is to blame. Tragedy strikes, but no one is expected to do anything about it. It is no one’s fault.” She shook her head. “I am dreaming about old stories,” she said. “I never liked the story of the changeling girl, never, not even as a child.” She gave Eva a rueful smile, strange in a Wraith queen’s face. “I felt sorry for her. A girl who was transformed into a monster, into a revenant, but who even the Ancestors could not catch, because she could shift her shape into that of a white bird. And so she haunts the forests still, disguised as a patch of mist or as a water bird, waiting for the unwary.” Teyla shrugged, rearranging her sleeve along her arm. “I expect this is the sort of tale that all peoples have, to prevent children from wandering off into the forest. Do as your parents tell you and be home by dark or the changeling will get you!”

Eva smiled. “A lot of cultures have cautionary tales like that. It’s true. But sometimes there’s a seed of truth in stories.”

“You do not dismiss them?” Teyla’s forehead rose, what would have been eyebrows if she had them.

“Stories are the frame we give our lives,” she said. “They teach us what to believe about ourselves and the world around us, give us touchstones. Give us ways of seeing ourselves that are either productive or not.” Eva took a sip of cold coffee. “A few years ago I was working with kids who had been in a natural disaster, a terrible hurricane. Many of them had lost their homes, their schools, everything they had. Some of them had lost their parents or brothers and sisters. Very hard stuff. And so one of the frames we were working with was encouraging them to write their stories as superhero origin stories.” Teyla looked quizzical. “Like in comic books,” Eva said. “A lot of superheroes became who they were because of something terrible that happened when they were a child. Their parents were gunned down in front of them. Their world was destroyed. They were pursued and hunted when they developed mutant powers. All kinds of things. But in the stories, it’s the origin story that makes the superhero who he or she is. So when we encourage the kids to frame the terrible things that have happened to them as part of a superhero origin story, what we’re doing is giving them a way of looking at themselves as someone who will transcend the tragedy. They’re going to be super. They’re going to come out of this aware of their special gifts, strong people who have a brilliant future.”

Eva took another sip of coffee. “In a very real sense, we become who we dreamed of becoming. We inhabit the story we tell about ourselves. But beyond that, myths and legends often are a way of passing down things that happened in the distant past.”

“You’re saying the changeling story may be true?” Teyla asked.

“I’m saying there may be a seed of truth in it. And you know that on some level, and your subconscious is trying to help you put the pieces together.”

“And when I do?” Teyla asked.

“Then you tell the story.”

Teyla was silent, and Eva rested her chin on her fingertips. “Let me tell you a story,” she said.

“Truly?” Teyla smiled again, odd and fleeting on a Wraith face. “I will hear your story, Dr. Robinson.”

“This is a story about both of us, and as far as I know, it’s true.” Eva marshaled her thoughts and began. “Once, a long time ago on the steppes of Central Asia, there was a woman. Her people were nomadic like yours were, pastoral people who followed their herds on the open seas of grass. They lived in tents and yurts built of animal hide, and they left no buildings.”

“One day, in the last years of the war between the Ancients and the Wraith, the Ancients came among them and took her away. She came here, to the Pegasus Galaxy.” Eva took a deep breath. “We don’t know if she came alone, or with many of her people. We don’t know if she came willingly, as an ally or a soldier or an explorer. Maybe she came as a wife or a lover. Maybe she came as a daughter. Or maybe she came as a drugged captive in the hold of a cargo ship. We’ll never know how she came. We just know she did. And we know one other thing about her.”

“What is that?” Teyla asked.

“She had a baby, a little girl. Maybe she had more than one. Maybe she had ten children. But she had at least one daughter, because through her daughter her mitochondrial DNA comes down to you. It passes through the female line, and like twenty percent of the people here that Carson has tested, yours comes from Earth. Yours comes from the steppes of Central Asia.” Eva laced her hands around her coffee cup. “We know something else. When Atlantis fell, when the Wraith destroyed their civilization, she lived. Somehow, in everything that happened, she wasn’t killed. She and her daughter survived. We know they did, because you are here, you and Torren who carry her mitochondrial DNA. She stands among your foremothers as surely as the Queen who gave you her Gift.”

“You are the story,” Teyla whispered. “It’s in your blood.” She looked up, her eyes meeting Eva’s. “And what happened to her kin?”

“The ones who stayed on Earth went in many directions,” Eva said. “There are people all over the world who have the same type. Some of them went east, and the type shows up in Siberia and northernmost China. Some went west, to the very edge of the known world, to Ireland and Cornwall and Brittany. And some went south, the most of them. The type is most common among the Pashtun peoples in Iran and Afghanistan.” Eva smiled. “Our mitochondrial DNA tells a powerful story. We are all, every person on Earth, descended from a single foremother an incalculably long time ago, and all our DNA is a variation on hers. We call her the African Eve, and you’re her daughter as much as I am. Once, a long time ago, there were two sisters and they said goodbye to one another. My foremother stayed in Africa, and yours began a long trek northwards, the first step on a journey of millions of lightyears.” She leaned forward, meeting Teyla’s eyes. “But the important thing is that it began with two sisters.”

“No,” Teyla said, and her eyes were hooded. “It began with three sisters.” She lifted her face and shook her head. “I am standing on the edge of something so enormous and so terrible that I do not even know how to phrase it.” She let out a long breath, her face inscrutable in its mask of plastic surgery. “I think I begin to see what Elizabeth meant, and it is a story so dark with blood that I recoil at it. I do not know what to do with this story.”

She got up and paced to the windows, stood with her hands against the glass, looking out at the snow. “I will give you a story,” she said at last. “Not the dark one, but the one everyone knows. The one all of my people know.” Teyla paused, her long green claws against the falling flakes outside. “Once, long ago in the beginnings of time, there were the Ancestors, and they dwelled in paradise. There was no hunger and no war, no danger and no illness. And yet they were discontent. And one among them said, ‘Let us make children in our own image, that we may joy in them, and in their precocious follies delight.’ And so they did. Ten men and ten women they made, each in the image of one of the Ancestors, tall and short, dark and fair, blue eyed and brown eyed. And they awakened them in paradise, and took them to their hearts.”

Teyla did not turn from the window, swirling snow half obscuring the towers outside. “This is what we believe of our origins. We were conceived in love by the Ancestors. We were nurtured as any baby beloved by its parents, sheltered from the storms until we were grown. We were the children of love.” She raised her head, her long black hair falling down her back, and Eva could not see her face. “We Athosians say that our first foremother was Amitas. It was not until I came here that I learned that her name has meaning in Ancient.” Teyla turned. “Her name is Beloved.” Teyla shook her head. “I do not know how to carry this story.”

“I can’t tell you that,” Eva said. She met Teyla’s eyes. “Except that I expect you’ll tell it at the right time, to the right person.”