by Jo Graham
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.”
Chapter Twenty-four
Compromises
Carson shifted the sling on his shoulder, trying to find a comfortable place for its strap to rest. The thing was really beginning to get tiresome, but he knew well enough that he should give it another week at least. As things were, it seemed that all he was going to take away from their disastrous desert mission in the long run was a nasty scar and a good story to tell about fighting off killer reptiles. There was no use in straining his healing arm and going back to worrying about whether he’d have the full use of it.
Still, it would be good to be able to use both hands again. He peered at the computer keyboard, hunting and pecking left-handed to type.
“Carson?” Jennifer said from the doorway of the laboratory.
Carson stood at once. “You shouldn’t be out of bed yet.”
“My vital signs and my blood work are all normal,” Jennifer said. “I’m not saying I feel great, but I’m also not planning to run a marathon or anything. I won’t even take the stairs. Transport chambers all the way.”
He looked her over. “How are you feeling? And at least sit down.”
Jennifer didn’t argue with that, sinking into a chair, her hand going to her hair as if worried that it was coming down from its severe ponytail. “I feel tired,” she said. “And I ache all over, but I suspect that’s from tensing up so much when — when I was being fed on. I took some ibuprofen, so I’m, you know, good.”
“It’s a tremendous shock,” Carson said. “And, before you say it, I know Todd healed you, but I also treated Colonel Sheppard when the same thing happened to him. It can be a difficult experience in more ways than just physically. It wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to schedule some time with Dr. Robinson.”
“I will if it bothers me, but…” Jennifer shrugged. “I mean, I’m not saying it wasn’t pretty awful, but I wanted to do this. I knew…well, maybe not exactly what I was getting into, but I knew what was going to happen, and I knew it was going to hurt. It was my choice. I think that makes it a little different from being tortured.” She shrugged again, and looked away. “There were only a few moments where I really thought I was going to die.”
Carson let out a breath. “That’s the problem with doctors as patients,” he said. “They’re every bit as stubborn as these great strapping soldiers.”
Jennifer’s mouth twitched in a smile. “Oh, we’re not that bad,” she said.
“Worse,” Carson said. “I’m so tired of this bloody sling that I’d have come down to complain about it if I weren
’t trying not to add to your stress.”
“I’ll take a look later, but I’m not expecting miraculously rapid healing,” Jennifer said. “Unless you can get Todd to arrange that for you.”
Carson repressed a shudder. “I’ll pass on that,” he said. He still remembered all too clearly having Michael close enough to touch him, and had no desire to be that close to any of the other Wraith. “Anyhow, I’ve had the Hoffan drug, remember? I can’t be fed on without the Wraith dying of it.”
“I know,” Jennifer said. “That’s why the next trial has to be me again.”
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Carson said. “You can’t imagine we’re going to let you do this again.”
“Nothing’s changed,” Jennifer said. “We still need to know if there’s any way to make this work. I have some ideas about what went wrong, and, believe me, I’m going to run all the simulations I can, but at some point we’re going to have to test this again. And I can’t ask anyone else to go through being fed on as a test.”
“Well, to start with, we know that your best try at a prototype didn’t work,” Carson said. “For all you know, this could be just one more blind alley.”
“If we always gave up the first time something didn’t work—”
“We’d have saved ourselves no end of grief trying to genetically modify the Wraith,” Carson said a little sharply.
“And let a lot of other people die,” Jennifer said. “Come on, the answer can’t be ‘we should always give up every time we have problems.’”
Carson shook his head. “Knowing that you might go through exactly the same ordeal again, that your life may depend on Todd deciding to heal you—”
“That’s why it has to be me again,” Jennifer said. “First, because now that I’ve experienced this, I can’t ethically let anyone else consent to go through it for research purposes.”
“I thought you were fine,” Carson said.
“Yes, fine except for having been in agonizing pain, which is the part that– I just don’t think we get to inflict agonizing near-death experiences on people. As a doctor, I have a problem with that.”
“I do, too.”
“But the main thing is, I know now that Todd will revive me, even at a point where I’m essentially clinically dead. I don’t know how much of that is that he really wants to make this work, and how much of it is that he’s scared of Teyla—”
“We’re all a little scared of Teyla, love,” Carson said with a smile.
“And I was starting to get the impression that I remind him of…” Jennifer hesitated, as if not sure whether she should repeat something a patient had told her in confidence. “Somebody who used to be important to him. Anyway, for whatever reasons, I’m confident now that if we try this again, he’s not going to let me die. I can’t put someone else’s life in his hands, not when I wouldn’t be as sure.”
“Show me what you’re thinking,” Carson said reluctantly. He tried to think entirely rationally as Jennifer talked through the changes she wanted to make to the retrovirus, to focus on the genetic puzzle pieces rather than on the faces of patients he’d watched die after being fed on. It was hard not to remember all the young Marines he’d sent home with the faces of old men.
“I see what we did wrong,” Jennifer said. “It’s a simple adjustment. We just need permission to do one more test.”
Carson shook his head. “I can’t recommend it,” he said. “Not when we’re no more certain this time than we were last time. And not when I still have grave doubts about whether making this thing work is going to be good for anyone.”
“It may be the only way we can save Rodney’s life,” Jennifer said.
“You’re not thinking—”
“Yes, I am,” Jennifer said, her voice rising in frustration. “What else are we going to do when we get him back? We’ve run a hundred simulations and none of them work. I don’t know how to turn Rodney back into a human permanently. Do you?”
“The original retrovirus we used on Michael—”
“Causes global amnesia at any dose high enough to keep the physical changes from reverting,” Jennifer said. “That’s not an acceptable long-term solution. You know Rodney wouldn’t think it was.”
“It’s better than dead,” Carson said. “He could relearn what he knows—”
“A PhD in astrophysics and a couple of decades of incredibly specialized experience? There’s no way, and you know it. Not to mention not even remembering his sister, or… or anyone else who’s important to him. He’d hate that.”
“He’d hate being dead worse,” Carson said.
“I’m not sure you’re right,” Jennifer said. “But, okay, that’s our best idea right now. So what if we try it, and Rodney isn’t strong enough to survive the process? If he hasn’t fed recently — and I can’t really bring myself to hope that he has–”
“It could kill him,” Carson said. “I know.”
“I looked at your notes on the original experiment,” Jennifer said. “Your suggestion if the first research subject didn’t survive the transformation was for Sheppard’s team to go out and get you another Wraith.”
Carson closed his eyes for a moment, his good hand tightening on the lab bench. This was part of the reason he’d wanted to spend his time out in the field, not doing this kind of research anymore. It all twisted together in his stomach, the experiment on Michael that the first Carson Beckett had done but that he could still remember, the experiments on the hybrids, the ones who hadn’t survived, who’d been disposed of as wasted materials—
“Carson?” Jennifer said, sounding concerned.
He made himself take a deep breath and focus on Rodney. Rodney, who God willing would be their patient soon, and who deserved to be well and whole again if anyone did. “We can put him in stasis,” he said. “Take the time to come up with a solution that isn’t as risky—”
“And eventually we’ll have to test it,” Jennifer said. “His best chance of surviving that is if he’s fed recently. Tell me it isn’t.”
“I can’t tell you it isn’t,” Carson admitted after a long moment. “But I can’t imagine that he’d want you to endanger yourself this way just to make his chances better. And if you think he’s just going to be willing to feed on you to survive, even if you know it won’t kill you—”
“If it won’t kill me, then it’s like… like if he needed a kidney transplant or something. It’s an acceptable risk for the donor, even if the process isn’t very pleasant. I’d be willing to do that for Rodney, if it was what he needed to stay alive. Wouldn’t you?”
“A kidney is one thing,” Carson said. “Letting him feed on you—”
“We’re hoping the process won’t be nearly as painful if we get it right,” Jennifer said. “And even if it is, wouldn’t you do it if it would save Rodney’s life? Wouldn’t Colonel Sheppard, or Teyla, or… Okay, maybe not Ronon, not after what the Wraith have done to him, but you get my point.”
“I suppose I would,” Carson said.
“This is not going to kill me,” Jennifer said. “If the worst thing that happens is that I go through what just happened to me again, I can accept that.”
“We’ve seen that being repeatedly fed and revived causes significant side effects,” Carson said. “When you treated Ronon after the Wraith brainwashed him, he was physically addicted to the Wraith’s reverse feeding process. That wasn’t easy for him to recover from, and I’m not sure I would say there aren’t any lasting psychological effects.”
“He said they did it to him over and over,” Jennifer said. “I’m not talking about anything like that. Once more, maybe twice at the most. Colonel Sheppard survived more than that under worse circumstances, and he’s fine.”
“For a certain definition of fine,” Carson said.
Jennifer spread her hands. “The one we use around here,” she said. “I treat Marines and airmen all the time who’ve been wounded in action. Some I can patch up, and they’ll be fine in a week. Some are
going to carry the scars they got here for the rest of their life. Some of them have disabling injuries, or disabling post-traumatic reactions. I can’t watch that every day and not be willing to do the same myself.”
“You’re not a soldier,” Carson said.
“I know,” Jennifer said. “And I don’t want to be one, and I’m actually not sure—” She hesitated, and then went on more deliberately. “I’m not sure I want to be part of a program that does that to people for the rest of my life,” she said. “But right now what’s important is that this is what I need to do to save Rodney’s life. Even if we never use this thing again, even if it never saves anybody else from the Wraith, if we can save Rodney, then I want to do this.” She raised her chin. “Will you back me up on this?”
“There’s no such thing as ‘never using it again,’” Carson said. “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”
“Yes or no, Carson?” Jennifer said.