“I do not think,” Teal’c began, and Aset spoke over him.
“There are no more left. We — Pharaoh’s men and you killed all that were found. Would we had left just one alive!”
“We could not,” Teal’c said. “The risk was too great.”
“I said it before,” Jack said. “There are — what? — dozens of worlds out there that have plenty of symbiotes to choose from.”
“Hundreds,” Danyel said. “But — putting aside the danger to Earth if we dig up the Stargate again — Jack, the Goa’uld out there are at the height of their powers. They’re not going to let us just walk up to them and help ourselves to a handful of larvae.”
“Daniel Jackson is correct,” Teal’c said. “The prim’tah are kept safe within the palace of their sires, except when a prim’tah ceremony is planned.”
“Prim’tah?” Jack asked.
“That is the Goa’uld word for the immature symbiote,” Teal’c answered. “And also the ceremony at which a Jaffa receives his — or her — first symbiote. It is an occasion of great import —”
“Prim’tah,” Danyel said. He had an odd, arrested look on his face. “I should have — Ra’s Jaffa’s prim’tah —” He shoved himself to his feet, nearly tripping over a cushion, and grabbed the nearest oil lamp.
“Danyel?” Aset said.
“Don’t wake the kid,” Jack said, in the same moment, but Danyel was gone. Sam looked at Jack, who shrugged.
Sam shook her head silently. She couldn’t like the idea of launching at attack on the Goa’uld — because, let’s face it, that was exactly what this would be, an attack that was likely to draw attention back to Earth. They’d beaten Ra once, but she was under no illusions about how easily it could have gone the other way. If Ra had managed to take the Stargate, as he’d planned… She shook her head again. She’d seen the world that resulted, and she hadn’t liked it much. Her own Daniel, who had been so sure they were meant for better things than English as a Second Language, or proofing other people’s papers, so determined to make them a part of this second chance — he and half a dozen of Jack’s friends had died just to get them here, and so many more had died to make the rebellion happen. To risk that, to risk the timeline, was unthinkable.
But Teal’c would die if they didn’t find him a new, young symbiote, and that was just as unthinkable. She knew what logic said, could do the cold math that said one death to save millions was a fair price. But that was not what heroes did, or so the books she’d read when she was ten had promised her, before she’d learned to compromise. Her father’s wingman had spotted the wreck, made sure there was a body to bury, because the Air Force didn’t leave their men behind. Jack followed the same creed. She would do no less. They couldn’t risk Earth for the life of one man, that was true. Not unless they were sure they could minimize the risk, and be certain of their success.
And they probably could minimize the risk enough, she thought. If they dialed out to some other world, or worlds, first — Danyel would know safe ones — surely that would muddy the trail, and keep Ra from thinking of Earth? With luck, he’d blame the theft on rival Goa’uld, or rogue Jaffa instead.
“If we find a source,” she said. “We can’t dial directly from Earth. Or, more precisely, we don’t want to dial Earth directly from whichever of Ra’s worlds we end up going to. Are there any worlds we could go through, ones that aren’t well watched, where we could dial Earth without getting caught?”
“Cut-outs,” Jack said, approvingly. “Nice thought, Sam.”
“Most Stargates are at least watched,” Teal’c said. “But, indeed, watched is not guarded, and there are worlds where even that precaution is neglected. I believe this would be a valid plan.”
Light blossomed in the doorway that led to the hall, Danyel’s lamp and Danyel behind it, a bundle of papyri under his other arm.
“I’ve got it,” he said. “I knew I’d seen something.”
Aset rose to take the lamp, looking worried, and Danyel dropped back onto the cushions, scattering scrolls around him. He searched for a moment, came up with one that looked as though mice had chewed it, and unrolled it to reveal not hieroglyphics but Goa’uld symbols.
Teal’c tilted his head to one side. “That is a calendar,” he said. “Ra’s?”
“Yes.” Danyel scooted forward so that Teal’c could see as he unrolled the tattered papyrus. “It’s a list of the worlds where the prim’tah ceremony was scheduled to be held — it looks as though Ra was rotating the ceremony among the various homeworlds of his Jaffa. Someone, I’m guessing one of the junior officers, was in charge of getting Jaffa home for the ceremony, and this was his list.”
Teal’c took the scroll, studied it calmly. “I believe you are correct.”
“So?” Jack looked from one to the other.
“So now we know a bunch of places where people are going to have a whole lot of immature symbiotes,” Danyel said. “Very immature symbiotes. Can you think of a better place to get a replacement for Teal’c’s?”
“The prim’tah will be well guarded,” Teal’c said, but he sounded more thoughtful than disapproving.
“I was at a prim’tah ceremony once,” Danyel said. “Well, sort of. On Chulak. They had all of the symbiotes in a tank at the temple, gave them out one or two at a time. I’m guessing Ra’s Jaffa would do the same.”
“Very likely,” Teal’c said.
“Yeah, but,” Jack said. “Look, this has promise, but we don’t know anything about any of these planets.” He paused. “Do we?”
“We do,” Danyel said, with a grin that made him look surprisingly young. “In fact, we have just gotten the most outrageous stroke of luck since — well, since I can remember. The next planet on the list is Abydos.”
“Abydos,” Jack said.
“It’s the first world we ever visited,” Danyel said. “Me and the other you, that is. In my time line.” A shadow crossed his face. “I lived there for a while — but that’s not important right now.”
Before his wife was kidnapped, Sam thought. Before he joined the Stargate program to search for her, before he found her a Goa’uld host. He had told them the story once, her and Jack and Teal’c, mentioned it occasionally, but always with that faint look of pain.
“But that was what, several thousand years from now,” she said.
“The Goa’uld are conservative,” Danyel said. “The temples on Abydos — well, OK, I’m really not sure about the proper tense here, but — OK, the newest one was built probably a few hundred years ago, a hundred years before our now. I know where the symbiotes will be kept, and I know how to get us there secretly.”
Teal’c nodded slowly. “That much I believe is possible. But —”
“Great,” Jack interrupted. “So we’ve got a plan, kids. Now all we have to do —”
“Hor-Aha will not allow us to restore the Stargate,” Teal’c said. “It is too great a risk to save the life of one man.”
“But for such a man,” Aset flared. “The man who put Pharaoh’s father on his throne, who kept Pharaoh himself alive to inherit! To give him a chance at life is only justice.”
Teal’c gave her a faint, almost embarrassed smile. Sam said, ”I think we can figure out a way to open the Stargate safely.”
“There is one factor as yet unconsidered,” Teal’c said. “When is this prim’tah ceremony to be?”
Danyel consulted the papyrus. “Chintar masr — OK, that’s, I make it three weeks from today.”
Teal’c shook his head. “That is too long. My symbiote will have matured by then.”
“Crap,” Jack said.
Sam bit back a curse of her own. They had been so close. “What happens if you keep it longer?”
“I cannot,” Teal’c said. “When it is mature, it will take a host. I cannot stop it.”
“All right,” Jack said. “We go sooner.”
“Too soon, and the symbiotes won’t be there,” Danyel said. “The earliest they’re likely to
be there is a few days before the ceremony.”
“And we need time to get the Stargate working again,” Sam said.
“Damn it!” Jack reached for his beer.
“Wait,” Danyel said. “There’s — well, it’s a possibility, anyway.”
Teal’c lifted an eyebrow.
Jack was more direct. “Danyel, what are you talking about?”
“It was tried once,” Danyel said. “Our Teal’c tried it, when he still had his symbiote. He was able to contact it by going deep into kelnorim.”
“That is impossible,” Teal’c said, but his tone was less certain than his words.
“Maybe not,” Danyel said. “Look, there was a Jaffa priestess, Shau’nac, who managed to contact her symbiote.” He hesitated, and Sam wondered just what he wasn’t telling. “She was able to persuade it not to take a host even though it was well past maturity. It didn’t take a host until it got a volunteer.”
“We are taught that contact with the prim’tah is not only impossible, but that the very attempt is dangerous,” Teal’c said thoughtfully. “To descend too deeply into kelnorim is to risk losing one’s ability to leave the trance state.”
“Of course you’re told that,” Jack said. “The last thing the Goa’uld want is for you to talk to their offspring.”
“Shau’nac made it work,” Danyel said. “And so did our Teal’c. It wasn’t pleasant, the symbiote didn’t like him much, but he was able to communicate.”
“I have no desire to die,” Teal’c said. He scrupulously refrained from looking at Aset. “Not if there is an alternative. I think this is worth the risk.”
“And that gives us time to open the Stargate,” Sam said.
“And to talk to Hor-Aha,” Jack said. He lifted his beer cup in a toast. “Sounds like a plan, kids.”
Sam leaned forward to join the toast, clicking her clay cup against the others. There were a lot of variables involved, too many — but it was the best they had.
Chapter Six
The Royal Way was different from how Danyel remembered it from his own time, one more change like the shifting sound of his own name. In his memory, the way from Saqqara to Memphis was a four lane highway, broadening to six lanes as it approached Cairo. He’d driven it dozens of times in a comfortable air conditioned SUV. The picturesque donkey caravans Catherine Langford had talked about existed only in the past, not in the modern Egypt of traffic lights and overpasses. He’d tooled along this road nine years ago for him, the last time he had been to Egypt for the SGC, steering a Land Rover through rush hour traffic, talking on his cell phone. For a moment Danyel wished Catherine were here. She would love to see a far older Egypt than the between-the-wars country of her earliest memories.
For one thing, it was much greener. The climate in Early Dynastic Egypt was much wetter than it would be five thousand years later. The band of green along both banks of the Nile was much broader, with rich groves of trees down to the water except where cultivated fields prevailed. Along the banks the land was marshy, with high cattails that provided shelter for a wealth of waterbirds. As they watched, ten or twelve ducks took flight, arrowing across the river towards the opposite shore.
“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” Jack said with an expression of satisfaction. He was carrying Ellie, who perched on his shoulder with one fat little arm around the back of his neck. Her blue eyes were wide, taking in everything around them with her usual expression of perpetual curiosity. It would have been more convenient to leave her at home with Aset, but less comfortable for Sam, as Ellie was still nursing, and there was no real reason Ellie shouldn’t come to Memphis. It was an hour on foot, and who knew how long they’d have to wait to see Pharaoh once they got there?
“It is indeed,” Teal’c said. “Yours is a rich world, Daniel Jackson.” His often impassive face held a hint of a smile, and his white shenti somehow still looked pressed despite having walked for the better part of an hour.
“It is,” Danyel said. It was odd to be addressed that way, hard to still think of himself as Daniel Jackson. He was Danyel now, the second syllable stressed as it had been on Abydos, closer to the man who had made Abydos home and married Sha’re than Dr. Daniel Jackson of SG-1. He lived in a different world as surely as if it were another planet. He couldn’t help but mentally contrast it with Abydos. He’d thought when he first walked through the gate, when he first came to Abydos, that Egypt must have been a pale shadow of the Goa’uld’s richer realm, that Abydos was the real thing and this the copy. Now, after eight years here, he knew that he had been wrong. Abydos was a pale copy of this.
The fields sloped gently down to the brown waters of the Nile flowing inexorably to the sea, desert and cultivated land cut like a knife edge of green. The distant peaks of the pyramids at Giza glimmered on the horizon, as unreal looking as always, a little more than seven miles distant, while above the blue arch of sky stretched from horizon to horizon.
It was not a world he had desired, but a place and time fallen in love with from books and shreds of refuse, as a man may see a woman in passing, getting onto a bus or standing beneath an umbrella in the street and be suddenly struck, so that her image stays with him forever and he seeks her always in the faces of strangers. This was what he had sought and found unexpectedly, bled for and watched his friends die for, only to find them replaced once more by strangers, them and not them. But this Jack and Sam and Teal’c were family now, even if they came from a different timeline, a future different from the one he had known. And there was Ellie, of course.
The city of Memphis spread before him, such as it was.
“O Lady of the White Walls,” Danyel said, and Sam smiled at him sideways. “That’s what it will be called,” Danyel said.
“When there are walls,” Sam said.
He nodded, and reached back to take the baby from Jack. It was more than his turn to carry her. “When there are walls. White sandstone, sixty feet tall and twenty feet thick, shining in the bright noonday sun…” He could see how it would be. He’d seen the broken foundations of stones his grandchildren might see hauled into place.
“That’s going to be fun to build,” Sam said, looking cheerful. The Sam in his original world had been an astrophysicist, but this time had no need for one. His Sam, this Sam, was displaying a remarkable talent for civil engineering. Most days they walked this way together to their mutual jobs, Danyel to the archives brought to the new city of Memphis from the Goa’uld palaces and installations around the land, and Sam to the building sites with Ellie on her back, where she worked with Pharaoh’s chief architect. Sometimes Teal’c came too, when he had work to do in Memphis, but often he was away southward to Upper Egypt, on business of Pharaoh’s. Jack… Hor-Aha had offered him a regiment of his best fighting men and set the golden collar of approbation about his neck himself, but Jack insisted he was retired. At his distinguished age, all he wanted was a peaceful life. While the young Pharaoh didn’t necessarily understand that, he’d bowed gracefully to Jack’s wishes — a house on the river, a good dog, and people to share it with.
“Do you think he’ll buy it? Hello?” Danyel jumped as Sam poked him in the bare ribs just above the waistband of his shenti. “Are you listening to me?”
“Sorry,” Danyel said. “What?”
“She asked if you thought Hor-Aha would go for it,” Jack said. “Opening the Stargate.”
“I don’t know,” Danyel said.
“He’s a lot more cautious than his old man,” Jack said. It had been his father, Narmer, who had led the rebellion against Ra, Narmer who had brought together lords from up and down the Nile to fight against the Goa’uld. Unfortunately, he’d barely lived to celebrate the victory. He’d died of a sudden heart attack a few months later, barely Jack’s age and worn out by living. His son had come to the throne unexpectedly early, but even though he was in his early twenties nobody had argued about it. Hor-Aha, whose name meant The Fighting Hawk, had proven himself in the rebellion against Ra. Now he was provin
g himself as Pharaoh.
“You’d think he wouldn’t be,” Sam said. “More cautious.”
Jack shrugged. “It’s one thing to be a guerilla leader. It’s another to rule a country. Different skill sets. The kid’s learning on the job.”
“So have we all,” Sam said with that sideways smile again. With one hand she hauled the spaghetti strap of her dress back into place where it had fallen down over her shoulder and winced as it rubbed her sunburn. “If I could have one thing from the future…”
“I know. Sunscreen,” Jack said.
There wasn’t any, and the only way to avoid the sun was to be mostly nocturnal, or to wear so many clothes that in the summertime one courted heatstroke. He’d had some bad sunburns himself, but with Sam’s fair skin she was the one who suffered the most. Finally she’d given in to carrying a parasol when she was out on building sites, for Ellie’s sake if not her own, like most higher status people did. He’d carried one for years, but then Danyel didn’t think it was girly.
Fortunately, they didn’t have to wait long in one of the courtyards of the palace before they were admitted. Teal’c stayed behind while a scribe in a spotless white shenti showed them into Pharaoh’s work room, a smaller room behind the audience chamber where a vast skylight let in light on two tables piled with scrolls, illuminating brightly painted walls and a few chairs of precious cedar wood, redolent with rich scent where the sun touched them. Incongruously, on one of the tables rested a Goa’uld data reader.
The Fighting Hawk looked up from his business, keen dark eyes flashing over them like his namesake, and got to his feet. In the privacy of the inner chamber he had removed his wig, and his shaven head gleamed with sweat. “O’Neill and Danyel,” he said, “And our architect Sa-Mantha. I am surprised you are all together today. How is the small one?”
Ellie favored him with a gap toothed grin. Hor-Aha had two small sons, one just older than her and one just younger, and she knew a baby person when she saw one.
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