by Jo Graham
“If the Ancients couldn’t deal with it, I’m guessing that it’s pretty hostile,” Sheppard said. “Come on, Rodney, you know the drill. Planets with Stargates that are uninhabited are uninhabited for a reason.”
“Great. I’ll be sure to bring my dinosaur repellent.”
“It probably won’t be dinosaurs,” Woolsey said. The glances exchanged around the table suggested that no one else agreed.
SGA-22 Unascended
INTERLUDE
On the third day they came to a town, earth houses with roofs of sod, long grasses growing on the roof, their roots holding everything in place, so that from a distance all one saw was a group of rounded hills, thin streams of smoke rising from chimneys.
“We will ask if anyone knows you,” the grandmother said, though she sounded as though she thought that was unlikely. “You must have come from somewhere.”
“Maybe the Wraith left her,” the boy, Kyan, piped up.
“The Wraith don’t leave their prey,” his father said.
“The Wraith?” The name meant menace, though she did not know who they were.
The father and grandmother exchanged a glance. “They come through the Ring sometimes,” the old woman said. “But our Ring is in orbit. They cull now and again, but we are a lot of work for a very small harvest. Mazatla has no cities.”
“This world is Mazatla.” Elizabeth frowned. The name ought to mean something. The name of the world she was on ought to be important, but it wasn’t.
“Yes.” The old woman nodded. “But Wraith or not, something bad has happened to you. Rest and heal, and perhaps it will all come back.”
“I shouldn’t be on Mazatla,” Elizabeth said. “It’s not my world.” A ring, a ring turning in a flash of blue fire… And then it was gone.
“Rest and try to remember,” the man said. “We’ll ask at the Gathering if anyone knows you or knows your people. We’ll stop here tonight and then go on to the Gathering at the Place of Two Rivers.”
“The Place of Two Rivers.”
Two rivers wreathed in mist, gray as steel beneath a winter sky, flowing together at a green point… There were bridges over the rivers, struts of iron against the sky woven like baskets of steel. One long span crossed on brick arches, iron rails dark with coal cars… Down the river, smoke rose from high smokestacks…
“Two rivers,” she whispered. “A city where two rivers came together.”
“Your home?” the grandmother asked.
Summer, and a green park full of people, boats on the river while above the sky lit with flowers of fire, green and gold and purple and blue, while she sat on a blanket.
“A festival,” Elizabeth said. “At the end of summer. To celebrate the working man?” The words came back slowly. “There was a boat race on the river between steamboats. We watched from the park where the fort had been. There were people on the bridges watching and cheering. I had a red balloon because it was my favorite color. We ate ice cream when it got dark and waited for the fireworks.” Her parents were there. She was older, old enough to go to school. “The City of Three Rivers.”
“Do you remember why you were there?” the man asked.
Elizabeth nodded slowly. She remembered, or at least the child she had been did. “My father
—
he had work there. We had come back after Kenya and we were going to stay. There was a building.” The pictures slipped away, and she grabbed at them. “A very tall building with classrooms in it. Very tall. Twenty, thirty, forty stories. A cathedral to learning? I don’t know.” And then it was gone again, the memories slipping just out of reach, words she had almost found. But she knew one thing. “I am from the City of Three Rivers.”
The grandmother looked at the father. “Sateda,” she said.
Elizabeth looked up. “Sateda?” The name was familiar, but…
“It sounds like the things they had on Sateda,” she said. She put her hand on Elizabeth’s shoulder. “Sateda was destroyed by the Wraith years ago. A few people escaped but they wander. They have no homes. Maybe you are Satedan.”
Satedan. The word was familiar. “Maybe so.”
“If so, you’ve been wandering a long time,” the father said. “I don’t know how you got here.”
“I have to get back there,” Elizabeth said. That was one thing she was certain of. “I need to go home.”
“There’s nothing left of Sateda,” the old woman said gently. “The Wraith destroyed everything. They killed everyone they could find. It’s gone.”
“I have to get there,” Elizabeth said. If the City of Three Rivers was there… “I have to find out what happened.” What happened to someone. Who? Who was she worried about?
“We could ask the Travelers,” the grandmother said. “Sometimes they come to the Gathering. They might know other Satedans. Sometimes they’ve had Satedans working on their ships.” She looked at Elizabeth. “You know machines?”
Elizabeth nodded. “Machines. Yes. Radios and computers and guns.”
“Sateda,” the man nodded. “You’re Satedan. Well, let’s see if the Travelers come and if there are Satedans with them.”
“I need to go there.”
The old woman patted her hand. “Sateda is gone. But perhaps we can find your people. Or you will find a place with the Travelers as other Satedans have.”
The word spread around the Gathering about the woman with no memories, and lots of people came to see her. They camped in the flood plain of two sleepy brown rivers, five thousand people or more, with bright tents in all the colors of the rainbow. The Mazatla did not live in cities, but in the summer there were these gatherings at various traditional locations, part fair, part sports meet, part courtship opportunity. Goods and animals were traded and sold, and there were matches of a game that involved throwing balls back and forth between three teams on an enormous staked out triangular field that went on all day until sunset ended the game. Then the victors paraded by torchlight, beginning a dance that went until dawn.
Elizabeth shared the tent of the family that had found her. When people came to see the woman with no memories she greeted them eagerly. Perhaps they would know where she had come from! But no one did. Each curious person at last went away shaking their heads. The woman with no memories had come from nowhere.
“The Travelers may know you,” the grandmother said confidently. “If anyone here does, they will.”
The Travelers arrived on the third day. Elizabeth heard shouts and went outside. A spaceship was descending from the blue sky streaked with a few high clouds, its white contrail bright. She raised her hand to shade her eyes, everyone else shouting and pointing too. It was bigger than…
Bigger than what? The comparison she’d meant to make slipped away. Bigger than a small ship meant to carry six to ten people. And smaller than…
Elizabeth frowned. A man in an olive green jumpsuit, bald headed, severe. He had a ship, a ship that was bigger than this one, and yet his name and the name of the ship ran away, lost somewhere among other things forgotten.
‘It’s the Travelers!” the boy Kyan said. He pulled on her arm. “They’ll help you get home.”
His father looked worried. “Only one ship this year. Something can’t be right.”
“Maybe it’s because of the Wraith,” Kyan said.
“Let’s hope not,” his father replied, and they walked together to the part of the field where the ship had landed.
Close up, the ship looked battered. It wasn’t all the same color, and parts of it looked as though they’d originally belonged to another ship, including a pair of long, organic looking weapons emitters. There was something disturbing about them, something inhuman.
The man coming down the ramp to cheers and greetings was entirely human. He was white haired and burly, wearing a bright red jacket over a jumpsuit. “Hello everybody! We’re glad to be here. Give us a few minutes to unload, folks. Then we’ll be glad to trade with everybody.”
“Lesko!�
�� A man was pushing through the crowd, which parted when they recognized him as Elizabeth did
—
one of the Mazatla Leading Men, elected to govern this year. “Any news of the Wraith?”
Lesko held up his hands as everyone quieted. “Queen Death is dead.”
“I know,” Elizabeth murmured, and the grandmother turned to look at her.
No one else had heard, and there were shouted questions.
Lesko held up his hands again. “An alliance of other Wraith and the Lanteans and the Genii killed her.”
“The Genii?”
“What did the Lanteans…”
“How could…”
“The Genii have a warship belonging to the Ancestors,” Lesko shouted over the din. “It was flown into battle by the Leader Ladon Radim with the assistance of a Lantean pilot, Lorne. It defeated Queen Death’s ship and then the Genii boarded it. They killed Queen Death.”
Shouts, cheers, people slapping each other on the back…
Elizabeth felt strangely isolated, wrapped in private quiet. Lorne. Ladon Radim. Should she know those names? Why couldn’t she find faces to go with those names?
She missed the question, someone shouting how Lesko knew.
“I heard it from the Genii myself,” he called back. “They showed me the video of Radim’s speech. They showed me the video the Genii took inside the hive ship.”
“But there are other Wraith,” someone said.
Lesko nodded. “The Genii and the Lanteans are making a treaty with them. Some of the other Wraith attacked Queen Death too.”
“A treaty with the Wraith?” the grandmother said incredulously. “You can’t make a treaty with the Wraith.”
“You can make a treaty with anyone,” Elizabeth said. “With the right leverage.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” someone behind her in the crowd said.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Elizabeth.” She was sitting at a desk in a room full of people, looking up at a green board covered in words. A man was leaning over her, dark rims to his glasses, dark hair. “You can’t negotiate with people bent on global domination.”
“I don’t see how you can fail to,” she responded. Her hands were young and thin and she wore a white sweater with blue floral trim around the wrists. “What other choice do we have? To simply say that we acquiesce? Or that we consider global thermonuclear destruction a viable alternative? Chernenko is a rational man…”
“It is not rational.” Mr. Henry’s mouth pursed. That was his name, Mr. Henry. He was her teacher. She was fifteen years old. “The Soviet Union does not pursue rational foreign policies, but rather ideological ones. Even when faced with Mutual Assured Destruction…”
“Surely there are rational voices.”
“The rational voices are powerless.” Mr. Henry shook his head. “As are those elements in the Eastern Bloc who oppose him. I’m sorry to tell you, Miss Weir, but Solidarity is just as doomed as the Prague Spring or the rebels in Budapest in 1955. The moment tanks roll into Gdansk…”
Elizabeth blinked. Kyan was shaking her arm. “Are you ok?”
“Yes,” she said. The crowd was still yelling questions, though Lesko held up his hands.
“All in good time!” he said. “Come on now. Let my people unload. We’ll have plenty of time for news.”
“Did you remember something?” Kyan asked cheerfully.
“Yes. I think.” Elizabeth shook her head. There was no more of it, just that moment, that frustration, those words that were so freighted with meaning that no one here would know.
Elizabeth put her hands at her side, watching the Travelers. Who am I? she thought. Who am I to feel that I should carry such responsibility?
“This is Atelia Zel,” the grandmother said. “Atelia, I’d like you to meet Elizabeth. She is the woman with no memories I told you about.”
“I’m pleased to meet you,” Elizabeth said.
They stood in the shade of the Travelers’ ship, its bulk casting deep cool shadows. A striped awning had been rigged and their wares were laid out on the tops of boxes and shipping crates, bulky things in front and the most valuable things displayed on cloths back near the open hatch where the sellers could keep their eyes on them. Lesko and a number of others haggled with the Mazatla, trading food for cloth, hides for medicines. Some few of them, the most valuable, were kept in a strong box, bottles neatly labeled and swathed in cloth. She only saw them for a moment, but some of them… There was something wrong, something familiar about them. Ramipril 10 mg… Erythromycin…
“Atelia is Satedan,” the grandmother said, calling her attention back, and Elizabeth turned to look at her.
Atelia Zel was of average height and young, with lighter skin than the Mazatla but not as pale as Elizabeth’s. Her black hair was braided tightly to the scalp, each braid worked with a single strand of gold thread. A little boy perhaps a year old peered curiously over her shoulder from a harness worn on her back over her spacer’s coveralls. He looked at Elizabeth curiously, then gave her a four-toothed smile.
She smiled back. “What a beautiful baby!”
At that Atelia smiled too. “Thank you. He’s a handful, and I have to watch him every minute so he doesn’t get into things.” Her eyes searched Elizabeth’s face as if looking for something familiar. “They said you might be Satedan?”
“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said. “I don’t remember much before I found myself on this world. Everyone here has been very kind to me, but nobody knows me or where I came from. The few things I do remember
—
cities, technology
—
suggest to these people that I’m Satedan.” Even as she said it, it felt wrong. And yet this young woman’s face was like so many she’d known, her clothes, the casual way she handled the electronics…
“What do you remember?” Atelia asked.
“Cities. Buildings with many stories. Vehicles.” Elizabeth shook her head. “Steel bridges over rivers.” Her eyes fell on the bottles carefully swaddled in the compartmented box. “Bottles like that. A hospital where sick people went for operations…” Corridors with nurses in white, a kind dark haired man with an instrument around his neck who stood outside her father’s room, talking to her in a low voice…
“We had hospitals and high rises,” Atelia said. “Medicines like these.”
“Are those from Sateda?” She didn’t quite pick them up. Not quite.
Atelia shook her head. “Not these. All our cites were destroyed and all our industries too. These came from the Genii who traded with the Lanteans for them.” She touched the one labeled Erythromycin gently. “These pills are for people who have a sickness in their lungs, a cold that has gone to the chest and their lungs are filling with fluid. When nothing else will save them, these pills will.” Her eyes searched Elizabeth’s face. “It’s a wide spectrum antibiotic for respiratory infections. Do you understand what that means?”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said, though she couldn’t have said how she knew. “For pneumonia.” And it was a good thing, somehow, that these pills were here. A cheap drug, worth almost nothing per dose, rendered nearly priceless to these people, just as she’d seen it in clinics
—
where? She looked at Atelia. “Are you a doctor?”
Atelia laughed. “I’m a scholar. Or I was going to be. But all that ended a long time ago.”
“How did you escape when your world was destroyed?”
“I wasn’t there.” Atelia looked up at the awning above, put her head back against the baby’s cheek. “I was in my last year of studies. I was going to be a scholar who studied other peoples, finding the common threads of culture that help us understand who we are and where we all came from. I was doing field work when Sateda was attacked.” Her mouth pursed. “Everyone I knew was killed.”
Elizabeth put her hand on her arm. “I am so sorry. And so sorry to have asked.”
“It was a long time ago.” Atelia forced a
smile. “And I’ve found a place with the Travelers. The technology that everyone understood on Sateda is rare and complicated everywhere else. I have skills that are valuable. I understand what these do.” She touched the bottle. “I learned.”
“And you have a family,” Elizabeth said.
“Oh yes.” She nodded, glancing back over her shoulder at the little face behind hers. “I have a son and a husband, though he’s not with us now because he’s a Hunter.”
“What does he hunt?” Elizabeth asked.
Atelia’s smile wasn’t nice at all. “He hunts Wraith.”
SGA-22 Unascended
CHAPTER THREE
The iris filled with blue as the gate opened, and Daniel leaned back in his seat as John threaded the needle’s eye neatly with the jumper. He was used to missions beginning with a hike, and found it an unaccustomed luxury to be able to take the jumper and as much gear as he wanted to haul along without having to be able to carry it all on his back.
They came through the gate into bright sunlight, grassland stretching out around them as far as Daniel could see. The grass was amber rather than green, seed heads swaying in the wind that the jumper kicked up. The distant horizon swam with heat.
“All right, listen up, I’m only going to say this once,” Rodney said.
Sheppard spoke up from the pilot’s seat. “Promise?”
“No.” It was easy banter, comfortable, and it made Daniel wish for a moment that his own team was there. He hadn’t been able to justify why he needed SG-1 on this mission – it had been hard enough making a case for him to stay and continue his research rather than going back to work – but he wished Sam were there. Although of course Sam wasn’t on SG-1 anymore.
“This planet has a high-oxygen atmosphere,” Rodney went on. “Anything that burns here is going to burn fast and hot. Anything that strikes a spark is extremely likely to start a fire. These?” He held up his P90. “Likely to strike sparks.”
“We get it,” John said. “No weapons fire unless it’s absolutely necessary.”