The Lost

Chapter Twenty-six: Origins

Teyla was awake quite early in the morning. Not an unusual thing with Torren, but it was unusual to see him to the Stargate. She had promised Kanaan these next few days with Torren, and Kanaan had offered kindly to come and get him, sparing her the walk to the settlement from the Stargate on her injured hip. And so there was an awkward scene in the gateroom, before the sun had even risen, in which they were gravely courteous with the care of people who are afraid that any gesture may be misinterpreted, who are trying so very hard.

Once they had been easy together. Once their friendship had been unstrained. Perhaps it would be again, when they were not learning how to be people who shared a child but not a life.

After he and Torren had departed, Teyla made her way to the mess hall. In days past she could always count on Rodney to be there at this time of day, drinking his endless cups of coffee and catching up on his email before he went to the lab or wherever else they needed to go.

He was not there, of course.

Nor was John or Ronon or Radek. John had been up late the night before talking to Sam Carter, Ronon was probably beating up Marines, and Radek was doubtless out in the snow repairing hull breaches on the Ancient warship. It was a thankless task, and he would be utterly foul when he was finished. Climbing around on the ice covered hull with a blowtorch was not his idea of fun.

Carson was in the mess hall though, his right arm in a sling, looking distinctly sporty despite having not shaved since their mission began. Presumably he hadn’t essayed it with his left hand. “Good morning, Teyla!”

She got her coffee and sat down with him. “You’re looking well, Carson. The beard is different.”

“A bit of the Sean Connery look, I thought,” he said. “Do I look like a dashing adventurer?”

“Exactly like one,” Teyla assured him, and they laughed. The coffee was hot, and there was real milk for it. Jinto had come with Kanaan, to bring the milk in trade.

“You’re up early,” Carson observed.

“I have seen Torren off to New Athos with his father for a few days,” Teyla said.

“You don’t sound pleased about that.”

Teyla cupped her hands around her mug. “It is not that I do not want Torren to be with Kanaan,” she said slowly. “It is only that I cannot relax when he is on New Athos. There have been so many raids, and New Athos is so vulnerable.” She raised her eyes to Carson’s. “Nor can I deny Kanaan his son on the grounds that it is too dangerous when Torren runs no greater risk than any other Athosian child, no greater risk than that which Kanaan and I faced growing up.” She shook her head. “When Torren is in Atlantis, I feel that he is safe. Perhaps it is not true. The city has its own dangers, and more than once enemies have penetrated. But I feel he is safe and I can go about my work. When he is on New Athos, I am poised for trouble, and I do not know how to stop worrying so.”

Carson nodded gravely. “Part of developing judgment is knowing what to worry about and what not to. The last time Torren was on New Athos, the Wraith raided New Athos and took Rodney. Of course you’re worried! Last time he was there you lost a friend. It could as easily have been your son, and you’re not able to deny that to yourself. You’re worried because there’s something reasonable to worry about.”

“I suppose when you put it that way,” Teyla said. The first rays of morning sun were coming in through one of the slanted windows high up on the walls, picking out shades of bronze and green in the ceiling. “It does not seem…neurotic.”

Carson snorted. “Now I know you’ve been around us too long when you start using words like neurotic! You’re about the least neurotic person I know.”

“Do you think?” Her words came out unexpectedly solemn.

He looked at her keenly. “Something bothering you, love?”

“No. Yes. I suppose so.” Teyla took another long drink of her coffee. “You are a geneticist, so perhaps you can tell me…” Carson waited, and she drew a breath, not looking at him. “The Genii believe that the people with Wraith DNA, the descendants of the humans who were part of that Wraith experiment, are what they call Bloodtainted. That they are mentally…wrong. We know, we Athosians, that some of the Lost who then returned went mad. They heard voices, they made no sense, and some of them even killed. Among the Genii, they believe it is because of the Wraith DNA. That humans with Wraith DNA are inevitably wrong. They are twisted in ways that cannot be fixed. They cannot help but kill. And what is most obscene, they take pleasure in it.”

Teyla laced her fingers around her mug tightly. “To my people that is the greatest evil. One may kill in self-defense or the defense of another. One may kill in passion or anger — this is bad, but it is understandable. People kill in fights or injure one another, and that is bad, it is a crime, but it is not evil. Evil is being like the Wraith. Evil is killing or tormenting another for pleasure.” She looked at him, at his worn, patient face. “I do not want to be thus. This Gift…”

“Teyla. Love.” Carson unwound one of her hands and squeezed her fingers. “Why would you ever do such a thing? I’ve known you five long years now, and you’re completely rational. I’ve never seen you do any such thing.” He sighed as though he marshaled his thoughts. “The Genii don’t yet have the technology to examine genetic code, and while I’ve no doubt that the original Bloodtainted that you describe were survivors of Wraith experiments, there is no way they could possibly have diagnosed any more recent cases as resulting from genetic abnormality. They simply don’t have the technology to get that kind of information. So what they’re going on is presenting symptoms. Every human society produces sociopaths and psychopaths. Regardless of their technology level, it’s part of being human. There are always some few people who aren’t quite right, regardless of their genetic heritage. Every society on Earth has dealt with killers. How we frame that, as possession by evil spirits or genetic abnormality or witchcraft or poor upbringings, is different from society to society, but it’s a problem all humans have when they live in large enough groups. I’m sure it’s a problem the Genii face too. But that has nothing to do with Wraith DNA. It has nothing to do with you or with your Gift.”

Her eyes searched his face. “You are certain of this?”

“Absolutely,” Carson said. “There is no cause whatsoever to think that your Wraith DNA makes you any less moral or rational than any other human being.”

Teyla swallowed. “And yet I fear sometimes what I will do,” she said quietly.

Carson squeezed her hand in his. “What are you afraid of?”

She could not look at him and still speak. “When we are in a fight, there is nothing for me but that. Even when it is only sparring. There is a satisfaction in hitting Ronon hard, in landing a solid blow and seeing him wince. I like it.”

Carson smiled. “I think Ronon is perfectly capable of taking the hard knocks he asks for. If you whale on Ronon a bit, I don’t see the harm in that. He can always stop playing.”

“That is true,” she said, and it was. “There is no reason he must spar with me if he does not want to. But.” She took another deep breath. “What does it say about me that I like to do it? That I find it pleasant to hurt someone?”

“There’s many a person I’d like to smack from time to time,” Carson said. He smiled encouragingly. “It’s a way of blowing off steam, I’d say. Mind you, I’m not the psychologist. That would be good Dr. Robinson. But as long as you’re playing a game with another consenting adult, with someone who can certainly adequately defend themselves or who can stop whenever they want, I don’t see how it’s wrong. Giving Ronon or John a few bruises isn’t the end of the world. Mind you, I’d object if you were putting Colonel Sheppard in the infirmary with a broken arm! But he’s had stitches often enough from sparring with Ronon and none from you, so I’d say there’s nothing to be concerned about.”

Teyla felt a furious blush rising in her face for reasons that made no sense whatsoever. “They play too rough with one another,” she said. “I do not like to need stitches.”

“Nor do I,” Carson said. He shrugged. “I suppose it’s manly or something. But I truly think you have nothing to worry about. Your Wraith DNA is a useful quirk, and nothing but that.”

Teyla met his eyes firmly. “Then you do not believe the Wraith are evil.”

Carson swallowed hard, and she knew he was thinking of Michael, of the misbegotten crew of the hive ship he had first tried the retrovirus on with such disastrous results. They had seemed men. And yet, in the end, they had slaughtered them because they were too dangerous. Because they were Wraith.

“No,” Carson said quietly. “I don’t think any sentient creature is inherently evil. Maybe that doesn’t make me a good Scots Presbyterian, not seeing the separation between the elect and the damned, but I do not believe that any person is inherently evil.”

“And they are people?” Her eyebrows rose and her stomach churned. “The Wraith are people?”

“How can you doubt that?” Carson asked. “Ninety-four percent of our genetic code is the same. They’re much more closely kin to us than Rodney’s cat or a bird or one of those lizard things that attacked us. Their physiology is clearly based on human physiology, their brains on our brains. Compared to something like the Asgard, there’s no doubt we have common origins.”

“How is that possible?” Teyla clutched at her coffee cup, and it was bitter in her mouth.

Carson dropped his voice. “I told you years ago that my first theory was that the Wraith were an accident. That human colonists on a planet with the Iratus bug accidentally gave rise to a hybrid. It was a good theory, but it’s wrong.”

He waited a long moment for that to sink in, and Teyla gasped. “Then where did they come from? You were certain that the Iratus bug…”

“I am certain that the Iratus bug plays a role,” Carson said. “But there’s simply not enough time after the Ancients return to the Pegasus Galaxy for that to happen. This kind of evolution requires millions of years, not a few tens of thousands. I believe there had to be a human element involved.”

“You mean that the Wraith were genetically engineered,” Teyla said.

“My guess, my working theory at present, is that human colonists were placed on a world where the Iratus bug was native. But as you know, it’s very deadly, and because it never releases its prey until the prey is dead, it’s very unlikely for anyone to survive an attack. My thought is that there was an attempt to create an immunity to the Iratus bug, a blood marker that would prove unattractive to the creatures so that when they attached themselves to an inoculated human they would find the human unappealing and drop off, something that would prevent them from killing. We know that the bugs will not bite one another, and when Colonel Sheppard was contaminated with the Iratus DNA that time we saw that they would not bite him. Perhaps the Ancients intended to create a vaccination against them.”

“That is entirely sensible,” Teyla said. “Because it is not that the bite itself is so bad, but that the feeding process continues.”

“Exactly. If they bit, found the human unappetizing, and dropped off, they would become a nuisance, not a deadly danger.” Carson’s blue eyes met hers ironically. “And you know those wacky Ancients. They were completely cavalier in their relations with humans, as we’ve seen from their social engineering experiments, entire peoples left to spend their lives in a game for watchers in Atlantis. Ascension devices, nanites designed to kill, not to mention the entire Replicator situation! Do we believe that they would not have mixed human DNA with that of the Iratus bug in the laboratory and inoculated a population with their experimental vaccine?”

Teyla let out a long breath. “No,” she said. “We cannot believe that. What you suggest is entirely in keeping with what we know of the Ancients, and with the other things that they have done.”

“And then the experiment went wrong,” Carson said.

“As it so often seems to have.”

He nodded. “And you know what happened then?”

“The same as with the Replicators,” Teyla said grimly. “The same as we did with Michael and his crew. They tried to kill them.” A chill ran down her back. Her imagination was not so clear as John’s, but she could not help but look backward to those experiments now discarded, human beings twisted into Wraith and then hunted as dispassionately as the Ancients did everything in their clean, bright ships. “But they did not succeed,” she said.

Carson’s eyes were grave. “They didn’t. And their experiment came back to bite them in the arse.”

“Carson,” she said, “You know you cannot say these things. You are standing on C4.”

“I know. That’s why I’ve not spoken of this, and will not until I’ve got some better proof.”

“If you say we are kin to the Wraith…” Teyla shook her head. “I can not even begin. That challenges everything we believe about ourselves, everything we know about our place in the universe, about good and evil and our reason for existing! You are uttering what is, to many of the people in this galaxy, the greatest possible obscenity. What you are saying…”

“Makes Charles Darwin look uncontroversial,” Carson nodded. “I get it. But there it is.” He leaned forward. “We already know the Ancients engineered life forms in the Milky Way, and that they messed with the genetic code of our ancestors. We know that they messed with yours too, and that they brought some not inconsiderable number of humans to the Pegasus Galaxy from Earth around 10,000 years ago, in the last days of the war, and that those humans mixed with those already here. That’s written in our blood, yours and mine. My ATA gene, derived from some Ancient on Earth, your mitochondrial DNA arising on the steppes of Central Asia. Do we really think it’s unlikely that the Wraith are a third iteration?”

She let out a long breath. “It is not unlikely. As little as I wish to believe you, as little as I want to believe that the Ancestors would have done this…” Teyla blinked eyes suddenly full. “I saw how they treated the Replicators, their creation. I saw how they treated my people when they returned to Atlantis, shuffling us off Lantea without even speaking with us, as though we were no more than cattle who had strayed into the yard! They sent us from our homes, from our crops in the field, when we had waited for them and praised them. We would gladly have served them. We would gladly have died for their city. But we were so little to them that even our deaths would be worth nothing to them.” Her voice choked. “And now we are a people bereft. We do not know what to believe. We are ripped from our anchors and are adrift on the sea.”

Carson took a drink of his own long cold tea. “It was like that, when I was Michael’s prisoner all those long months. You look things in the eye. You lose your faith. It trickles away down some dark hole. And what it leaves is what you really are, the things you really believe in.”

She reached for his bad hand. “And what do you believe in, Carson?”

“I’m a doctor,” he said. “I try to alleviate human suffering. I can’t know the meaning of it, nor the rhyme or reason, but I do know that’s what I must do.” He closed his fingers around hers. “There’s a poem by Leigh Hunt, about a man who asked an angel if his name was on the list of those who loved God. The angel told him no, it wasn’t. Well then, said the man, put me down as one who loves his fellow men.”

“And was that the right answer?”

“I expect it was,” Carson said.

Teyla put her head to the side. “You are very much like John,” she said. “If he can only save everyone, then he will be worthy.”

“You can never save everyone,” Carson said gravely. “There are always some who are beyond your help.”

“I know that,” she said, “but he does not believe it. It is always a failure in him, a fatal imperfection. If he saves ninety nine people out of a hundred, his thoughts are always on the one who was lost.”

“The good shepherd,” Carson said ironically. “A play on words, my dear.”

“I suppose I have translated it differently,” Teyla said. “In our language Sheppard doesn’t translate as farmhand, but as guide.” She stopped, ice against her spine. “That is Todd’s name, in his own language. I learned it when I masqueraded as his queen, Steelflower.”

“I always thought they had a bit in common,” Carson said. “And speaking of the devil…”

John and Sam Carter were making their way across the mess hall toward them, trays in hand. “Good morning!” Sam said brightly.

“Good morning,” Carson replied. “What’s on your plate today, John?”

“I’m taking the Ancient warship to the Genii as soon as Radek and Kusanagi sign off on it,” he said, sliding in beside Teyla with his eggs and bacon. “You can sit this one out, Teyla. Keller said to stay off that hip, and there’s not really anything for you to do. Kusanagi is coming with us along with a full Marine team, and the Hammond is escorting us just in case, but basically I’m spending two days driving the bus.”

“Some bus,” Sam said with a sideways smile, sitting down beside Carson. “Pity we can’t keep it.”

“And start a war with the Genii,” Teyla said.

“I didn’t say keeping it was a good idea,” Sam replied. “Just that it looks pretty sweet.” She grinned at John. “Race you there?”

“You’re on, Carter.”