Mirror, Mirror

by Sabine C. Bauer

  "What is that?" she asked Wex, gently turning the foundling's head so the neck was exposed.

  "It's a scar. The shape looks familiar. Could be-" He broke off to let out a low whistle. "It looks exactly like the bite of an iratus bug! But if it were that, he'd-"

  "Be a dead man," she croaked, nowhere near as dismissively as she'd intended, but still capable of faint satisfaction at not having told an outright lie. A potent mix of elation and terror churned in her mind and soul-not unlike those heightened sensations she recalled from the moments just prior to battle-and it punished a body long since unused to such fierce emotion. For the first time in a life that had lasted too long, she fainted.

  She came to steadied by the strong arm of Wex, who must have prevented her from falling off the side of the cot. "Can you hear me?" he barked, voice rasping with concern. "Teyla Emmagan! Talk tome!"

  Why was everyone so intent on remembering her name today? Perhaps this was a sign, too.

  "I'm fine," she murmured, hating how weak she sounded. Teyla Emmagan, indeed! Teyla had been a warrior.

  "No, you are not fine!" Relief at hearing her speak made Wex's concern snap into anger. "I shouldn't have brought you here. You must have been up all night! I'll take you back to your cave now."

  "No! I cannot leave. He will die."

  "He'll just have to take his chances. I would rather have him die than you."

  "No! I'm telling you!" She sensed that Wex was not going to yield, but perhaps that was an advantage, because it gave her an excuse. "Alright. Take me back to my cave. But tell your men to bring him, too, quickly and carefully. He will need constant care, and I don't want to have to do it in this reeking tent of yours."

  The warmth was a good thing. And he was dry. Surprisingly, he also was still alive. John Sheppard decided to consider the ramifications of this astonishing development at a later date-preferably when his head hurt a little less-and fell asleep again.

  The next time he woke, he noticed that it wasn't just his head that hurt. Clearly, survival had come at a price, and there were several things seriously wrong with him.

  What the hell had happened?

  Being able to remember stuff would help, but the only thing he could recall was feeling unreasonably cold and wet. That, and being carried. A bunch of guys, a very old woman, and... Wex? But there'd been no kids, he was sure of that. Only a bunch of guys and an old woman. Avery old woman, in-

  "You are awake again. Good."

  He'd been right about the old woman at least. He recognized the voice, a gentle, oddly familiar lilt, brittle with age. It had been woven through some really strange nightmares, the only constant in a scarily unstable dreamscape.

  A scrawny hand and arm threaded under his neck, raised his head.

  "Ow," he said, trying to sound indignant in a polite sort of way. He didn't want to upset the natives just yet.

  "Your head hurts because you are dehydrated. Drink this. All of it."

  The rim of a cup touched his lips and triggered a vague recollection. He'd been made to ingest several gallons of Drinkthisallofit since arriving here-wherever here was. Of course, he could simply open his eyes and find out, but that carried a risk of aggravating the headache.

  "Drink!" the old lady ordered again and jogged his head for emphasis.

  Ow!

  Drinkthisallofit was hot enough to allow only small sips and tasted healthily-in other words, revoltingly-herbal. He had no idea of its precise curative properties (if any) or if Dr. Beckett would approve of them, but refusal wasn't an option. Been there, done that, got yelled at. His eyeballs felt as if they were coated in ground glass, but he forced his lids open anyway. If he had to drink it, he at least wanted to know whether the stuff really was as Day-Glo green as it tasted.

  John found himself squinting into some kind of outsize mug without handle -a gourd?-and felt a small stab of dis appointment: the liquid was colorless. Strangely enough, his frivolous foray into the world of the living hadn't prompted any reaction from his nurse. He closed his eyes again, took another sip, swallowed, and pulled a face.

  "God, this tastes foul," he whispered. If a wet towel could talk, it'd sound like him.

  What the hell had happened?

  He'd asked that before. Maybe he should try to get-

  "I know that, Colonel Sheppard. Drink it anyway."

  What he did instead was swallow the wrong way, flying into a coughing fit that wreaked havoc on his head. She'd gotten the rank mixed up, but she knew his name. How? To the best of his knowledge-which, admittedly, didn't amount to much-he hadn't been lucid enough for introductions.

  Who was she?

  The second time round, opening his eyes wasn't quite as agonizing. Or perhaps he was getting used to it. He blinked, trying to focus, and eventually the blurred shape hovering over him lost its fuzzy edges. And yes, she was old. Ancient-no pun intended. The fingers holding the mug were liver-spotted, thick jointed and gnarled with arthritis. Snowy, sloppily braided hair tumbled over a bony shoulder, and the face was withered and scored with wrinkles. Her eyes were white, irises barely distinguishable from the sclera. He doubted that it was glaucoma or any age-related disease-if she'd been taking care of him on her own, she was far too deft to have lost her sight recently-but she definitely was blind. And if you looked past the age and the sightless eyes, there was something else... family resemblance? Though why Teyla had never mentioned it was beyond him.

  "I think I know your... granddaughter?"

  "I guess I must look that old to you." There was nothing amused in her laughter, just irony and a deep sadness, bordering on despair. "I have no granddaughter, Colonel. I am Teyla Emmagan, daughter of Tagan."

  "I'm flattered about the promotion, but if you were Teyla, you'd know that I never made it past major," he said slowly, getting a hazy idea that it would be pointless. The woman -whoever she was -was easily old enough to suffer some degree of senile dementia.

  "Major Sheppard?" Straightening up, she cocked her head as if to listen to an inner voice. "I suppose that was a possibility," she murmured to herself. "I don't know what I expected. Not to find him this young, for sure. It might even mean that I'm not the original either." Without warning, she burst into laughter again. "To think, all these years I have never even considered... It just goes to show how much we all want to be unique."

  Oh yeah.

  Nuts.

  Of course there also was a better-than-average chance that he was too dazed to follow.

  "What the hell happened?" There. He'd finally said it.

  "I was hoping you could tell me, Major. All I know is that Wex's men found you on the beach. Although... Were you flying a jumper?"

  The jumper.

  That explained everything. For the first time in his short but compellingly checkered career, Major John Sheppard had gone in. Well and truly gone in, not just plopped down a tail rotor short of a helicopter. He'd bumped his head, and that really did explain everything.

  "Maybe you should get Carson, Teyla. I'm feeling a little... weird."

  "Dr. Beckett is not here," she said gently. "You are not delusional, Major. Try to remember what happened. It is important."

  -Why?"

  "Because, if you remember, you will believe what you are seeing. You will believe me."

  John wasn't entirely sure he wanted to. He had yet to discover a part of his body that didn't hurt, he might be losing his mind, and he desperately wanted to go back to sleep and wake up a few hours later to find that this was one of those scaryweird dreams he'd been having.

  "Were you flying a jumper?" she asked again.

  Outside, a herd of small, fleecy clouds is racingpast the view port, and just for the heck of it, and because he can, he flips the puddle jumper into inverted flight Nothing wrong with jazzing up a routine coastal survey, is there? Admittedly, with the inertial dampeners being a notch or three beyond state-of-the-art, it's nowhere near as much of a kick as it should be, but it'll do.

  "Oh yes
, it'll do, " he whispers, grinning like a five-yearold.

  Flying isn't a job. It's a necessity. Something changes when he 's flying. Maybe it's about being happy, but he doesn't care to analyze it. Too easy to analyze things to death. Never far behind the elation lurks the memory, mercifully distant now, of the run-up to his abortive court-martial. He's never admitted it out loud, but worse than anything was knowing that he'd lose flight status upon conviction. Sure, there was always crop-dusting, but it would have been a poor substitute for driving a PaveLow through a war zone. And even that doesn't come close to driving a juniper Most fun you can have with your clothes on.

  He comes out of inverted flight and chases the little ship into a vertical climb, only easing up when he's about to leave the atmosphere and go orbital. Once, just once, he'd like to do that with McKay, just to see what

  The jolt is so violent, he is flung from the pilot's chair and against the navigation console. His first, dizzy thought is that this can't be happening inertial dampeners being a notch or three beyond state-of-the-art then he helplessly slides into a vortex of images, past, present, future, fanning into endless permutations of the same events.

  He stands behind Rodney, fretting, promising himself never to become a flight instructor Only one of him will not regret that thought later all others have lost both McKay and Brendan Gaul to a marooned Wraith, and most never live to tell the tale.

  He lies in the rear that goddamn bug stuck to his neck, feeding. Dozens of him don't make it, because their teams can't bring themselves to kill him.

  He sits in the pilot seat, more alone than he 's ever been in his life, on collision course with a hive ship, with Elizabeth Weir and Radek Zelenka by his side, chased by countless darts, fire and death blossoming all around, again and again and

  He is Ikaros, flying too close to the sun and falling, wings aflame, torn apart into a myriad selves, falling and burning and

  The visions shrivel as suffocating heat triggers some internal alarm. It explodes into shrieks stall warning? and he puts a hand on the console to shove himself to his feet, flinches away, almost screaming, his palm blistered by hot metal. He struggles upright somehow, knows what he'll be seeing even before he looks out the view port: the jumper is in uncontrolled reentry, systems fried, shields failing, a ball of fame hurtling toward the surface. No flying skill in this galaxy or any other could stop the inevitable, and all that's lef for him to do is stand and watch and try to ignore the fact that he can barely breathe anymore.

  Falling toward a coastline now, a coastline that should be familiar and isn't, in some subtly distorted kind of way. It's been twisted out of shape like one ofDali c clocks by the same thing that's warping everything else around him. Reality has become a cakewalk, and so he latches on to the one immutable fact that leaps out at him. If his trajectory remains stable and it will, because there's not enough wind-shear to affect the parameters of speed and mass and gravity he'll come down right on top of a village that's popped up in a place where there's never been a village before. Athosian? Has to be, though it hardly matters. What matters is that there are people, men, women, children, all of them bodies to be.

  "Not gonna happen, " he croaks. `Not gonna happen. "

  The mind-ship interface no longer works, he knows that. If it did, the jumper would have responded to his simple desire not to be pulverized on impact. He stumbles into the pilot's seat, briefly flexes his hands. It'll be a whole new way of becoming part of your ship, he thinks grimly as his fingers close around the manual controls. The first few seconds are excruciating, then he feels nothing, because the nerves have been burned along with his skin.

  Sluggishly, the jumper responds, and coastline and village drift starboard and out of sight. All that's ahead now is open water and maybe, just maybe... A sudden image forms in his mind, summer camp for inner city kids, a lake in the forest, and he's twelve, barefoot at a pebbled shore, learning how to skip stones. It's all about speed and angle. Shaped like a broken-off breadstick, the ship has all the superior gliding capacity of a tank but at this point he has nothing to lose by trying. He extends the drive pods, bartering reduced dragfor stability, forces up the nose of the jumper and fattens the path of descent.

  What's the stalling speed of a puddle jumper?

  Million dollar question, and he probably should have found out before now At a guess, twice as high as that ofEarth's most famous flying brick, the space shuttle. Abysmal, in other words. He's right. The moment he's thinking it, the jumper starts shaking, giving him his answer; and he eases the stick forward to let itpick up speed again.

  Arms and shoulders cramping with tension, he plays the game all the way down, fights barely responsive controls to balance air speed and angle of descent, and, at the last possible moment, fuels what little power the engines have left into the inertial dampeners to cushion himselffrom the impact.

  The last thing John remembered clearly was hitting the surface of the water and being tossed through the cabin like the crash dummy in a road safety commercial advertising the benefit of seat belts. There'd been a crack, audible even over the noise of the impact, when his lower leg snapped. After that, things became alternately black, wet, and cold.

  "Ow," he growled again.

  "You have my thanks for saving the village and my people," the old lady said softly. "It was a very brave thing to do."

  "You're welcome." Then it occurred to him that, despite her promises, he'd got no closer to believing the woman really was Teyla than he'd been five minutes ago. On the upside, Drinkthisallofit had been taken out of his face. Good. It smelled as vile as it tasted. "So, how does this-"

  "Don't talk so much, Major." A hard old hand sought his shoulder and gave it a brisk pat. The woman smiled. "I know I provoked it, asking you to remember, but now let me do the talking. You wish to hear how any of this proves that I am indeed the Teyla you knew?"

  "You could start by explaining why you're a few decades older than me all of a sudden."

  "Shh. I said Don't talk so much. From now on be quiet. You may nod," she added graciously. "These... visions... you experienced after the impact that knocked you off course?"

  Obediently, John nodded.

  "They were no visions. They were real." She must have felt him move in preparation for protest, and her hand pinned his shoulder to the cot. "Alternate realities, all colliding in a single, focal point in space-time. They were caused by entropy."

  "Entropy," parroted John, unable to stop himself. It was too crazy to believe. She was crazy. On the other hand, he had felt it. The splintering of his being into uncounted selves.

  "A rift in the fabric of space-time. It has been unraveling ever since, threads becoming tangled, tearing, crossing others they should never have touched."

  "I know what entropy is... How? What caused it?"

  "We caused it." A tear rolled down her withered cheek. "And you cannot begin to understand the destruction it brought"

  «We?„

  "Our team. The Atlantis expedition. I. At a time in the past that should have been your future."

  His throat tightened. He couldn't be sure if her... if Teyla's story was true, but one thing was beyond a shadow of a doubt: she believed what she was saying. Every word of it, and one word stood out-destruction.

  "Teyla?" Reaching for the fingers that still clamped his shoulder, he realized for the first time that his hand was bandaged. "Tell me what happened."

  She let out a shuddering breath, seemed to come to a decision. "I will do better. I will show you. This will not be easy for me. Nor for you. Brace yourself"

  "For what?" The question was barely out when he knew, sensed her sliding into his mind with the same absolute poise that had always controlled her physical movement. Oh yes, this was Teyla alright. "I thought it only works with Wraith," he whispered. "Last time I looked I didn't have Wraith DNA..."

  "But have I had many years to practice. Do not be afraid, Major Sheppard. Leastways not of me."

  CHAPTER FO
UR

  Charybdis ±0

  uppressing a yawn, John stepped from one foot to the other. Sitting on the floor wasn't an option, was it? Nu-huh. Dust showed up real well on black BDUs. Given that Colonel Caldwell had picked up where Everett left off and made it his mission in life to find fault with everything Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard did or thought of doing, staying presentable would mean less grief and static all round. In other words, the lieutenant colonel would just continue to lean against the wall, propping up a P90, babysitting Drs. McKay and Zelenka in a part of town proven to be detrimental to one's health, and waiting for the fun part of the evening to start. Well, it had to happen sometime. He hoped.

  "Elizabeth, there's something you need to see," Rodney's voice droned from somewhere inside a console at the center of the room. Though similar in some ways, the device seemed different from the terminals they'd discovered so far. Larger, more rough and ready, more quaint, in the same way a Commodore 64 would look quaint next to an i-Book. "No, next year will be fine!" snapped McKay. "That's why I'm calling you now!"

  "If it belongs to archive system, there must be holographic interface," Radek Zelenka pointed out for the fifth time. When he was agitated he tended to lose track of his articles.

  Or maybe it was exhaustion. The Czech scientist didn't seem to have gotten any sleep since they'd found this lab-if it was a lab-and his habitual unmade-bed-look had received an interesting makeover. John nursed a mental image of a cot where someone had died a slow death that involved a lot of thrashing. Typhoid, maybe. Or malaria... He embellished the picture by making it an epidemic that had struck down the entire family. They'd all died in the same bed.

  "Ahoj! Are you deaf?' Zelenka hollered at the pair of legs that stuck out from under the console.

  The legs gave a startled twitch, which was accompanied by a hollow clunk from inside the device, which was followed by silence. The legs looked limp.