Unascended

Chapter Seven

Rodney glared at Dr. Eva Robinson across her desk. “You’re going to give me a bunch of stuff about stages of grief and giving up and moving on, right?”

Eva looked at him quizzically. “Am I?”

“Isn’t that your job?”

“To be truthful, I’m not completely sure what my job is,” Eva said. “I actually don’t have any idea whether or not it’s possible for someone to unascend. So since I don’t have any relevant information, there’s not much point in me trying to convince you one way or the other.”

Rodney blinked. “You’re different.”

“What, because I don’t offer opinions on things I know nothing about?” Eva shifted in her chair as if searching for a more comfortable position. Her leg was finally out of a cast, but she wore a support strapped on over her pants leg, and a cane propped against the corner of the desk.

“You’d be the only one,” Rodney said.

“I don’t actually know whether or not Dr. Weir could have ascended or unascended,” Eva said. “And I’m a cognitive therapist. So let’s just look at it this way — what would you do differently if you knew she was indeed alive? What concrete actions would you take?”

“I’d look for her,” Rodney said. “I mean, isn’t that obvious?”

“Aren’t you looking for her?”

“Well, yes, but…”

Eva put her head to the side. “Are there any concrete actions you would do differently? Given that you don’t know where she would be, and that Dr. Jackson has already said that his best guess is that she would be somewhere you might normally go, then what would you actually do differently if everyone believed you?”

“Not much.” Rodney frowned. “So that’s what this is about, right? That I want people to believe me?”

Eva just smiled in that annoying psychologist way.

“Of course I want people to believe me! I don’t want my friends to think I’m nuts!”

“So how do you prevent that?”

“Prove I’m right,” Rodney said.

“Suppose you can’t. Suppose this is unprovable. Suppose there will never be any way to find out if Elizabeth Weir has unascended.”

“That’s stupid. There’s nothing that’s unprovable.”

“Really? Lots of people have questions that are unprovable. Did he love me? Did I do the right thing? What would have happened if?” Eva said. “You can’t know the answers to those things. All you can do is live with the question.”

“There’s always an answer. You just don’t know it.” Rodney heard his own voice rising in anger. “There’s always someone who knows only they won’t tell you.”

“Is there?”

“I mean, a stupid question that I don’t even care about the answer, some ridiculous question like whether or not Jennifer loved me, she knows the answer and probably you do too, but you won’t tell me because of client privilege or something, but it’s not like you don’t know. You just won’t tell me.”

“But I don’t know,” Eva said. “I actually don’t have any idea about that either. Just like whether Elizabeth Weir has unascended, I don’t have enough information to have a useful opinion.” She leaned forward. “There are things in life we will never know the answers to. And there has to be a way of living with that.”

“Not for me,” Rodney said.

Settling down in his office, John opened up his laptop and began scrolling through his email. Most of the emails were either reports from the military contingent of the expedition, which he filed to deal with later, or citywide emails that informed him of the regularly scheduled movie night, solicited signatures for a petition to convert part of the northeast pier into a hockey and broomball rink now that the weather permitted, and reminded interested persons that Atlantis’s knitting circle was open to all comers.

He shook his head at the last — several of the scientists had broken out in amateurish woolen scarves since they’d arrived at their new home, and recently he’d noticed some of the airmen sporting knitted caps when they weren’t in uniform. So far the Marines seemed to be resisting, although he suspected that if they had another outbreak of really cold weather, there would be some Marines knitting away before it was over.

The last email was from Sam Carter. He hesitated for a moment before clicking to open it.

John sat there looking at the email. He wasn’t sure what to do about it, or how to even start thinking about it. It had taken him a long time to give up hope for Elizabeth, but he’d finally managed to do it around the time that she’d walked through that gate into empty space. He’d tried hard to reach a place where it wasn’t one of the things that featured in his nightmares.

And now he had Rodney and Sam both saying that there was some chance that she might have found a way out, that she might be out there somewhere waiting for them to find her. They were back to the only answer to whether she was alive being “maybe.”

He balled his fists. He hated “maybe” as an answer. Especially when it was still possible that the whole thing was a delusion brought on by hypoxia and the trauma of having been forcibly turned into a Wraith and then mostly turned back.

He thought about talking to Dr. Robinson about it, but he figured she wasn’t going to tell him whatever Rodney had told her. Instead, he walked down to the infirmary and found Carson preparing a set of syringes.

“Am I interrupting someone’s appointment?”

“Actually, these are for Rodney’s cat,” Carson said. He looked a little sheepish. “Not that I’m really supposed to be practicing veterinary medicine, but that cat’s not much more than a kitten, and he still needs his vaccinations. I had the lot sent to me from Earth, but as I’m allergic to the beasties, I’ve told Rodney he’s going to have to handle giving the injections himself. If he were planning to be squeamish about that kind of thing, he shouldn’t have signed up to be a cat owner.”

“That should be interesting for everyone concerned,” John said.

Carson looked amused. “Maybe he can get Ronon to hold Newton for him.”

“Maybe he can get Ronon to stun Newton.”

“I can’t recommend stunning a cat, medically speaking. You might try wrapping him in a towel, assuming that Rodney ropes you into helping.”

“I plan to be busy,” John said. “Whenever he’s planning to do this.” He sobered. “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about Rodney.”

“Aye, what about him?”

“Has he told you he thinks he saw Elizabeth?”

“Aye, he has,” Carson said more slowly. “He wanted to talk to me as a friend, mind you, not in any professional capacity. Or I wouldn’t be able to talk to you about it.”

“I understand that,” John said. “I was just wondering… ”

“Whether I think he’s completely mad?”

“As a friend,” John said. “Not in a professional capacity.”

Carson let out a slow breath. “I know how Rodney felt about Elizabeth. How we all did. I can only imagine how everyone must have felt when she died. When you found me in Michael’s lab and I heard that she was gone… it was a tremendous blow, I can tell you.”

“You think this is just some kind of delayed grief reaction.”

“I didn’t say that,” Carson said. “I think it isn’t like Rodney to say such a thing if it didn’t happen.”

“There was the time in the submerged puddle-jumper.”

“There was,” Carson agreed. “But afterwards, Rodney knew perfectly well that Colonel Carter hadn’t really been in that jumper with him. And the things she told him were really things he was telling himself. He just needed to hear someone else say them at the time.” He shook his head. “Rodney’s been through a great deal with this business with the Wraith, but he’s back in perfect health. And yet he still maintains that he saw Elizabeth, that she tried to help him, and that she told him she was Ascended.”

John shook his head. “I thought we knew for sure what had happened to her. It sucked, and we all hated it, but at least we finally knew.”

“Aye, that’s the hard part around here, isn’t it?” Carson said. “After so many close calls and miraculous reappearances — my own included — it’s hard to ever be really sure that anyone’s gone for good. If I were Dr. Robinson, I expect I’d have my hands full with people saying ‘but how can I get any closure when I’m not sure that the person we just had a sad funeral for this week isn’t going to turn up as a clone or a robot or an amnesia victim next week’?”

“And what would you tell them?”

“Thankfully, that’s not my job,” Carson said lightly. “And from where I’m sitting, I think we’re blessed with good fortune to have had so many people who we’ve given up for lost one way or another turn up safe and sound. Or something of the sort. I can’t say that Rodney was exactly safe or sound, for instance, but he’s back with us, and that’s more than any of us thought was likely for a while. I’ll deal with any number of complicated feelings if they come from knowing there are reasons to hope.”

“Do you really hope we’ll find her?”

It took Carson a long time to answer that question. “I do,” he said finally. “It doesn’t cost me anything to hope, so, yes, I do.”

“I don’t know about that,” John said. He shook his head abruptly. “If Rodney comes in looking for me to help him wrestle with his cat, I was never here.”

“Mum’s the word,” Carson said with a sympathetic smile that might not have been entirely for John’s chances of being mauled by a Siamese cat in the near future.

He found Rodney in his lab, and waited until Rodney finished criticizing the way one of the other scientists had graphed some function that might have represented anything from deep-sea temperatures to the city’s power consumption curve, for all John knew. “McKay, can I talk to you?”

“I’m a little busy,” Rodney said.

“I’ll keep it short.”

“Sure,” Rodney said after a minute. He followed John out into the hall and stood looking at him with a belligerent expression. “I already talked to Dr. Robinson,” he said. “So if you’re worried that I’ll go round the bend and you’ll be held responsible for it, you can stop worrying.”

“I think you might be right,” John said.

“I know I’m right. I just told you, I talked to—”

“I mean, I think you might be right.”

Rodney stopped and looked at him for a moment, his defensiveness draining away. “You mean you think I might be right about Elizabeth.”

“I’m not saying you are right,” John said. “I think the best that we can say at this point is that we don’t know. But if there’s a chance — any chance — that Elizabeth might be out there, then we have to do whatever we can to find her. And we will.” He swallowed hard. “And that’s what I wanted to say.”

“Thank you,” Rodney said after a moment. “What made you decide you believed me, or do I even want to know?”

John shrugged. “I’m not saying I believe you. I’m saying I think you might be right. Sam did say she thought it was theoretically possible.”

“Oh, Sam said! Sam said it, and you believe her? You’re going to take her professional opinion over mine? I’ll have you know that when it comes to theoretical physics, her grasp of what’s possible is nothing compared to mine.”

“She’s agreeing with you, McKay.”

“Yes, but you didn’t believe it until she said it.”

“She’s less personally involved.”

Rodney shrugged a little awkwardly, not looking at John. “Well,” he said. “Elizabeth is our friend.”

“She is,” John said. He told himself it didn’t cost anything to say “is” rather than “was.” It almost didn’t hurt. “And if there’s anything we can do to find her, we’ll figure out what that is and we’ll do it.”

“Yes, we will,” Rodney said, his jaw set, and John was reminded for a moment of the aged hologram version of Rodney from the future he’d been trapped in, the one who had waited and worked his entire life for a chance to save the people he cared about from deaths he couldn’t and wouldn’t accept. And the craziest thing about it was that he’d done it. It had taken his whole life, but he’d saved them in the end.

“But since we don’t have any leads right now, we’re going to go talk to the Wraith about the Asgard,” John said. “Have you got your head on straight enough to do that?”

Rodney nodded. “We’ll keep looking. But right now we know where to look to find out something about the Asgard and our weather machine—”

“You said you weren’t sure it was a weather machine.”

“It’s probably a weather machine. I’d be a lot more certain of that if we could find another one.”

“So let’s go talk to the Wraith,” John said.