“Liar! God damn you! Liar!”
The shrieks reverberated from
the ceiling, and the crystal
“Liar!” she screamed again,
furiously wiping her face. The sobs gradually, madly, turned to hiccupping
laughter.
Her hand found a third crystal,
and she threw that, too, and the next and the one after that, until the compartment
was empty. Silence fell, thick and oppressive, making her gasp for breath.
Silence, that’s what was wrong with this place. Destroy the silence, and…
And what?
And nothing.
How long had it been? Weeks? Months? Years?
She’d lost track. If she activated the mainframe—always supposing she managed
to do the impossible—there’d probably be a calendar and clock somewhere, but
the glutinous pace of seconds turning to minutes turning to hours was as much
of an abomination as the silence. Perhaps more so, because it was proof,
staring her in the face and laughing.
“Liar, liar, pants on fire,”
she sang tonelessly, kept singing, kept the silence at bay with it.
The empty hatch yawned at her
as if it wanted to suck her in. She didn’t like it. Didn’t
like this room, not anymore. She pushed herself up along the wall,
listing like a wino on a bender. And she’d better stick to that wall, too. She
was barefoot, and the floor was carpeted with glittering shards of glass or
crystal.
What had happened here?
Who’d—
Her toes struck a hatch cover.
It fell over, hammering noise through the room. Had she taken it off? A gaping hole in the wall, emptiness behind. Nothing left. A
soft, keening sound settled around her, until she realized she herself was
making it and stopped. Looking back at the inactive chamber across the room,
she gave a small, tired shrug. The glass door stood open, promising sleep and
oblivion, but, like every cad she’d ever known, it would fail to keep its
promise. Certainly now that the crystals had been destroyed.
Not that it mattered one way or
the other. The technology was so far beyond her, she’d never had a glimmer of a
chance of fixing whatever had gone wrong. She’d tried, doggedly, during the
first endless weeks. She’d sat on the floor, staring at what looked like
eclectic objets d’art, trying to see a similarity to
some type of circuitry she might be familiar with and unable to find so much as
a trace of damage. She’d swapped crystals randomly, each time hurrying back to
the chamber, getting inside, closing the door, waiting.
It’d never worked. And at some point—she’d forgotten when exactly—she’d simply
given up. Given in. Whatever.
Janus had told her it was safe.
Had he ever even considered
this contingency?
“Who cares?” she murmured.
Janus had died more than five
thousand years ago. He must have. Somehow she doubted that he’d made the cut
for Ascension—he’d been far too much of a loose
cannon. Unless he’d simply been the two-faced bastard his name implied, a
two-faced bastard to whom the fact that he’d stolen her life was worth a shrug
at most. She preferred that. It left room for anger, and anger was the easiest
of emotions, one you could keep at boiling point all by yourself. It also was
an antidote to the poisonous despair she tumbled into each time she was crazy
or desperate enough to contemplate her situation.
As far as she could determine,
the stasis system had malfunctioned late in the second cycle. The failsafe had
revived her and spewed her out into a nightmare. At first she hadn’t known that
anything was wrong. Janus had programmed the system
to wake her periodically—once every three thousand years—to allow her to rotate
the Zero Point Modules that powered the city. She’d done just
that, returned to the stasis room, stepped into the chamber, closed the door,
waiting to drift off to sleep another three thousand years. Except, it hadn’t happened.
Then, slowly, brutally,
realization had crept in. She remembered the terror. She was reminded of it
first thing in the morning, last thing at night, wherever she went or stood.
She was alone in a deserted city beneath the ocean, alone beyond the scope of
human comprehension, galaxies and millennia removed from anyone and anything
she’d ever known.
Oh, she’d tried to put a
positive spin on things at first. There are no problems, just challenges,
right? She’d fix it. She’d make it right, somehow. After all, she was Dr.
Elizabeth Weir, the President’s favorite troubleshooter: Have plan, will
negotiate. Have needs, will find food. And she had. She’d found storage rooms
with imperishable rations that tasted like cardboard but kept her going. She’d
clung to that perverse triumph, not understanding that it was a Pyrrhic
victory. Not until she’d finally been forced to admit that her years with the
State Department hadn’t equipped her to repair advanced alien technology.
Then she’d conceived some
foolhardy notion about exploring the city. After all, that was what had brought
her here in the first place, wasn’t it? She’d drifted around, climbed to the
tops of Atlantis’s spires, poked into nooks and crannies. She’d discovered
rooms of all descriptions and countless strange devices—none of which she could
get to work, because she possessed neither the ATA gene that allowed a select
few humans to operate Ancient technology, nor the skill and electronic gear
needed to access Atlantis’s mainframe. In other words, it’d been like being
eight years old and gawking through the window of the candy store without a
nickel to your name. What it boiled down to was that
she would grow old here, with nothing to do and no-one to talk to.
Perhaps it had been this very
prospect that had pushed her over the edge. Her mind was slipping, folding in
on itself, no longer able to suffer the lack of human contact and stimuli. She
knew enough psychology to have expected it, and mostly she welcomed it. There
were times when she’d suddenly come to in some remote part of the city, unable
to say how she’d gotten there or what she’d been doing. It meant she’d lost an
hour or five—more recently it was days—and every hour lost was a precious sixty
minutes she didn’t have to live in this place.
Like now.
Well, it was one source of
interest, she supposed. You never knew where you’d find yourself next. Perhaps
she should start a betting pool.
The idea struck her as
uproarious, and she slid halfway down the wall again, shaking with hysterics.
Then the laughter broke off, as suddenly as it had come. She straightened up,
gingerly started moving toward the door, skirting the worst of the shards.
She’d have to act now, while she was still capable of doing it. The only thing
that had stopped her so far was the hope of somehow still achieving what she’d
meant to achieve. Save lives.
Hope springs eternal.
Not if you messed with time itself, apparently. There was no changing the outcome: some
four and a half thousand years from now another version of herself would lead
the expedition to Atlantis, the city’s shields would fail, and everybody would
die, including her. She’d just die a little later than the others.
Out in the hallway, lights
activated as she went and shut down again behind her. For a while—who knew how
long ago now?—she’d spent days wandering up and down the corridors, making
lights come on and off, pretending she was coming home from work and Simon had
heard her car and was switching on the lights in the driveway for her. And
she’d go inside, and they’d have dinner and a glass of wine by the fireplace,
and they’d talk… That game, too, had palled.
The hallway took her to the
control center. The enormous room with its sweeping gallery and staircase seemed to belong to a dead person, every item in it shrouded
in white dustsheets, as if waiting for a realtor to drop in and sell the place
on behalf of the heirs. Every item, that was, except the console that controlled
the Stargate. She’d uncovered that one, left it open,
because occasionally she needed a glimpse of salvation. Now she hesitantly
stepped in front of the console, one finger tracing the edge of a dialing pad.
She’d thought about it, of
course. God only knew how often she’d thought about it. Dial Earth, go back…
and end up in the middle of Egypt during the Old Kingdom, where people had yet
to rise against a Goa’uld called Ra. Sometimes she fantasized about how she
really had gone back and had, in fact, been the driving force behind the
revolt. Another, less glorious, scenario was the one where she got taken as
host and revealed the coordinates for Atlantis to the Goa’uld. Which probably would spell the end of mankind and countless other
races across any number of galaxies.
The only real option she had
was to randomly dial an address in the Pegasus galaxy. Suicide
by Stargate. She didn’t fool herself into believing that there was any
other likely outcome. The Wraith had won, after all.
End it right here.
The thought of it was tempting
beyond words.
Her fingers continued to caress
the pads. It’d be so easy, so—
A pad lit up, then a second and
a third.
“My God…”
No, she couldn’t run. She’d
wait and see, and never mind the consequences.
The sequence completed, the
last chevron locked—the seventh, so the wormhole was coming from a gate within
the Pegasus galaxy—and the event horizon burst into life, bathed the room in
shimmering blue light and retracted.
“It’s Jumper One.” Precise,
British tones, and Peter Grodin sat at the console,
smiling up at her. “About time, too. They were
supposed to be back an hour ago.”
She spun away, blood thudding
in her ears. Peter was dead. He had drowned four and half thousand years from
now, like all the others.
“
Rodney couldn’t have spoken. He
lay sprawled in front of the gate, unconscious or dead, and morphed into a
tall, uniformed man she’d never seen before, flung backward into the gate by a
gunshot.
“Will someone tell me what’s
going on?” she yelled, knowing even then that she had to be hallucinating.
Another, vaguely familiar voice
burst into the control center. “Ma'am, Jumper One is lodged in the Stargate.
Teyla, Doctor McKay and myself are in the rear
compartment with the major. He's in bad shape.”
“Lieutenant Ford?” she
whispered. “Lieutenant?”
He stood right in front of her,
terrifyingly alien, his left eye suffused with blackness. Past him she could
see a small ship emerge from the event horizon. It was ungainly, of the same
type as the ships stored in the hangar upstairs.
Abruptly the Stargate shut
down.
And the silence was back.
Of course.
She was alone.
Gasping for breath, she
absently noted that the delusion had been so intense she’d responded
physically. Her eyes, bleared by the glare of an imaginary event horizon,
squinted in the gloom now. When her vision returned, the ship was still there,
slowly rising toward the ceiling and an opening into the hangar. It was piloted
by a dead man yet unborn.