"So what you're saying is that you think those things are human?" Jack asked, gesturing emphatically towards the trees where the howlers were roaring their evening chorus.
It wasn't that the concept was so unbelievable, it was just that Jack wasn't convinced he'd heard right, because it didn't seem like it made any damn sense. Why would the Goa'uld take humans from more than one area of Earth, probably at different times, and then turn them into monkeys? Granted, the Goa'uld had done some pretty trippy experiments, and of course when in doubt you could always explain their actions by reminding yourself that they were pure evil ego, but this... this was some sort of cartoony comic book nonsense that Jack wasn't adequately prepared to believe.
He wasn't enjoying a bit that it sounded like his joke about a planet where apes evolved from men was beginning to sound plausible, especially since he was pretty sure he'd read that comic in the late fifties or early sixties when he was a kid. Something about some mind controlling gorilla wanting to take over the world or something. He'd never been a big fan of comics. Well... not a really big fan.
"It's the only thing that makes sense," Carter said.
Except the aforementioned part where it patently didn't make sense.
"Okay, let's say for the moment I'm going with you on this journey," Jack said with a patient sigh, pinching the bridge of his nose to try and fend off the headache growing behind his eyes, then looking from Carter to Daniel in the twilight, "Which I remind you is a big ask..."
He paused for dramatic effect, and also to see if anyone would argue. They didn't.
"What does the gorilla army want with us?"
"Howler monkeys aren't gorillas," Daniel corrected, apparently from reflex.
"And, according to the two of you, those aren't howler monkeys," Jack retorted.
"We haven't figured that out, sir," Carter said in response to Jack's question.
"Yet," Daniel added quickly.
"Is it not possible that these creatures' ancestors are your howlers monkeys, genetically manipulated to be larger and more powerful?" Teal'c inquired passively.
Carter made one of those cute faces she made when she didn't want to hurt someone's feelings by saying their theory was phenomenally unlikely, but she was pretty sure they were wrong.
"It's possible," Carter said slowly and gently, "But so far everything Daniel and I think we've found doesn't point to that."
Teal'c inclined his head slightly, while Jack said, "Everything you think you've found?"
"We've only just started unlocking the secrets of the device and that melded language," Carter said defensively, "We need time to be sure."
"Time we may not have if the monkeys decide we look delicious," Jack retorted sourly.
"Sir," Carter said, "I don't want to be here any more than you do. But I think Daniel's right; figuring out that device and why the howlers want us to understand it may be our only way home."
"Just so long as we know where we stand," Jack remarked stiffly.
"In a cage made of thorns, surrounded by apes with very sharp teeth that may or may not want to kill us," Daniel spoke up quickly, "Yes, Jack, we know," he then repeated the last more gently and with less irritation, "We know."
"Well," Jack said, deciding to give them the win, for the moment, "Just so long as we all know."
"We do, sir," Carter assured him.
That night, none of them could sleep. Daniel and Carter were too excited by what they'd learned, their minds spinning with new possibilities and ideas and theories they just couldn't wait for morning to discuss. Pretty soon the pair of them gave up trying to pretend to sleep, and retreated to the far side of the enclosure to try and not disturb Jack, who couldn't be disturbed because he wasn't sleeping either.
He lay on his back, staring up at the alien stars, wondering if anyone else had the same feeling he did, which was that this was all going to end in blood somehow. He hoped he was wrong, mainly because the howlers had so far won every battle virtually uncontested, making them very dangerous adversaries. Besides, there were so many of them, and so few of SG-1.
While Carter and Daniel had spent the day being geeky, Jack had spent most of it being bored, and watching the monkeys interact overhead. He was getting to know their sounds, not as complex communication, but as the same sort of simple yet surprisingly multifaceted signals dogs used.
He'd watched howlers puff themselves up, flatten their bodies, rock their heads back or turn them to the side, slowly tense their facial muscles to show their teeth versus a quick flash, low growling and high yelping, tails raised and lowered, flicking or still. With dogs, a message was never conveyed solely by one part of the body. Contrary to popular belief, a wagging tail alone signaled nothing of the dog's mood. A stiffly wagging, highly held tail could mean the dog was about to attack. A tucked, fast and limply waving tail could mean the dog was about to pee itself and bolt in fear. Without taking the ears, eyes, mouth, face, neck and rest of the body into account, the tail alone signaled nothing clear. But Jack was good with dogs, and he'd found that the ability to read dogs gave him the ability to make educated guesses about the body language of virtually all Earth animals, and even humans to a degree.
Daniel might think context and intimate understanding of language was necessary for communication and -to a degree- he wasn't wrong. But even without knowing what associations one howler had with another, or understanding what "words" were exchanged, Jack could see when casual gestures ascended into abrupt, fierce violence. In fact, the unusually violent nature of the howlers lent credence to the assertion that they were former humans. Most signaling between animals was to avoid violence, but the howlers seemed to go after one another with some regularity, though most of it was just slapping each other rather than actually trying to hurt each other. But that was still a step above simply yelling at each other and posturing, which they also did a lot.
Jack didn't need to know their names or favorite colors to see how quick they were to attack. In fact, observing the howlers in the trees, Jack began to wonder if perhaps Scar hadn't been being inordinately patient with them by the standards of his kind. That wasn't a comforting thought.
Even if Carter did figure out what that device did (given enough time, Jack had no doubt about whether or not she could, he just wasn't sure she'd have that time), it was possible she couldn't make it do whatever the howlers wanted her to make it do. And then... and then SG-1 would be in trouble, because the howlers seemed to have one response to things not going their way, and that was to take out their frustrations on the cause. Barred from that by social hierarchy, they would take out their frustrations on the nearest subordinate. As prisoners, SG-1 was under everyone else in the social ranking system by definition. These monkeys got angry, and it was going to be their hide.
Jack had never been overfond of apes, and it wasn't because of that psycho-nonsense about how human they looked being disturbing to man's ego. It was because of the horrible shrieking noises they made when they fought, the unnaturally large teeth that most of them seemed to have in spite of being advertised as vegetarians (many of them were omnivores, and some were even predatory), and the fact that even a thirty-pound ape was powerful enough to rip a man's arm from its socket and beat him to death with it. And also that thing they did with their lips. That just wasn't right.
He wondered how Teal'c could take it. The dark Jaffa had resisted most of Jack's attempts at conversation, seeming content to pass the time in motionless silence. But for Jack, the boredom was unbearable, and the worrying was pointless and circular. He had to pick what he was going to think about, because his thoughts naturally liked to descend into a dark place that was hard to get out of once he was in it. In avoiding thinking about the worst parts of his own life, he found himself wondering what had happened to Daniel. What that man had done to him. And that was perhaps the most pointless thing of all, since it was not only allowing his imagination to get away from him, it was worrying about something that had already happened, and there was no point to that because you couldn't change the past. Or, to be more accurate, you shouldn't change the past. Time travel was a bitch.
But he couldn't quite pull himself away from thinking about it. The way Daniel had gone pale when he'd answered that phone arrested Jack's memory. The fear in Daniel's blue eyes, the haunted sound in his voice when he'd talked about it last night to distract Jack. Even without words to fill in the blanks, Jack could hear and see. Sometimes Daniel spoke the loudest when he said nothing at all.
It was bizarre to think that Jack had once been so deep in his own grief and suicidal thoughts that he'd been unable to see Daniel for who he was. On that first trip to Abydos, he'd missed the loneliness in Daniel's eyes, somehow failed to hear the intense desire to belong somewhere, anywhere in his voice. Jack had been purposely building a wall to keep the world out because he couldn't bear the pain of losing his son. But it seemed that the world had built a wall to keep Daniel out of it. Daniel was naturally a bright, cheerful sort of guy, a little absorbed in his work, a little bit obsessive, a little bit crazy, but gentle and empathetic. When others hurt, Daniel hurt along with them. It was how he was built. Jack had tried hard not to wonder what sort of life had created someone like that.
For some reason, it seemed like the gentlest, kindest souls always went through the most torment.
Not wanting to think about it, Jack sat up and went over to eavesdrop on what Daniel and Carter were talking about. They were deep into that weird geeky way of being, wherein they seemed to speak in partial sentences, thinly veiled references to things only they knew about, and a kind of melded language of their own as Carter spoke in science and Daniel in several dead languages. Jack had more than once observed that, once Carter and Daniel were in sync on something they were working on, they ceased having to stop and explain terms to each other. Each just knew what the other meant. It was kind of eery to listen to, and Jack sometimes wondered if Babel fish weren't somehow involved.
Neither Carter nor Daniel seemed to especially notice that Jack had joined them, which was just as well because he didn't actually have anything to add. Daniel did briefly glance his way, and there seemed to be an understanding in his eyes that Jack wasn't here to talk, that he hadn't come to complain about the noise either, that he just wanted to be, to hear the voices of his teammates and be reassured by their presence and what for them qualified as "normalcy." Perhaps out of her own awareness, Carter pretended she didn't notice Jack had joined them at all. Acknowledging him would require a reminder of rank and association, and neither Jack nor Carter wanted that right here and now.
An amount of time passed during which Carter and Daniel continued to talk and pretend they hadn't noticed Jack, somehow without really ignoring him. And then Teal'c silently joined them, coming to stand at Jack's side. Jack gestured for him to sit and join them, but Teal'c showed no inclination to do so and remained standing, but silent. Even though nobody looked at Teal'c or spoke to him and he himself said nothing, he was as inexplicably but undeniably included in the group as Jack was.
This was the part of SG-1 that outsiders couldn't see, that couldn't be explained or defined to anyone, yet was real and had substance, and could be felt by whoever was close enough to them. Not physically speaking, of course. Plenty of people physically touched members of SG-1 without ever touching on what really made them special. It was the kind of closeness you couldn't see, like what General Hammond had with them, all hidden behind rank designations and formalities and distance, but real just the same. Nobody outside of SG-1 understood them as individuals or a team better than General George S. Hammond. And, Jack suspected, nobody ever would.
"It's obvious," Daniel's sudden pronouncement yanked Jack out of the doze he'd sort of fallen into.
"Is it?" Jack inquired, almost reflexively.
Daniel turned toward him as if he'd expected exactly this question, even though Jack had been there half the night by then without ever having said a word.
"I can't communicate with them using speech or signing," Daniel said, "We know that."
"So what are you gonna do?" Jack asked rather sarcastically, but without putting any real energy in it because he was still partially asleep, "Make some pheromones like your peripheral exclamations and have them smell those?"
"Polistes exclamans," Daniel corrected, but would not distracted, "And no. It's been right in front of us all along. I just missed it because they ignored me the first time."
"Well don't keep us in suspense," Jack admonished, "Share with the rest of the class."
"Writing."
Of course. Daniel had tried writing almost right away, when Scar was still dicking around with him. He also hadn't known how to merge the three alphabets into the single written language, which he presumably did now, and so far the howlers had seemed to expect the members of SG-1 to cover the gap between the two species' ways of communication without being met halfway. The howlers sat back and made the team do the work communication-wise. But had Daniel really learned enough of that language to effectively write it? Jack didn't doubt it. When it came to languages and written symbols, Jack had come to believe there was nothing Daniel could not do.
"What are you going to say?" Carter asked after a moment.
Daniel sighed, and Jack knew what he was going to say before he said it:
"I have no idea."
For once, Daniel didn't sound particularly delighted by that admission. For once, he sounded worried by uncertainty, weary of trying to think, discouraged by the failure that had plagued him from the start. He also sounded like he was about to sneeze, which he did a second later.
"Just," Jack began, then paused until Daniel looked blearily in his direction, "tell them who we are, why were here. Ask them what they want with us. You know, your basic alien ice breakers," he then added, primarily for the humor, "Just, whatever you do, don't talk about sports; you're not good at it."
Daniel nodded thoughtfully, and repeated, "No sports."
"Absolutely not," Jack confirmed, "Oh, and ask them to give back your antihistamines. Hopefully they're as tired of listening to you sneeze as we are."
Daniel kind of looked at him for a moment, like wasn't sure whether or not Jack was joking. He then seemed to conclude that the remark was one of those that was half in jest, and accepted it.
Daniel nodded again and said, "Right..."
As if they had somehow recognized what the team had done yesterday or even last night, the howlers did not attempt to drag Carter and Daniel back out to the ruins. Instead of the usual horde of monkeys pouring in, this time when the gate opened, only one entered. The little wiry one that was more ginger than black. It was funny to Jack that he had at first seen no difference between one howler and another, when this one was clearly much smaller and differently colored, and meeker in mannerisms than the rest. Jack was thinking maybe the brown eyes were a little paler too.
Ginger walked into the enclosure, ignoring the chattering of the howlers in the trees, and seemingly fearless, despite the fact that one howler alone against the entirety of SG-1 stood little chance, even aside from the knives that two of them still had concealed on their persons. Reaching the center of the enclosure, Ginger sat down, and looked at Daniel as if expecting him to make the next move.
As if she already knew.
It occurred to Jack as Daniel went and sat across from Ginger in the dirt that the little howler was a female, whereas Scar was obviously and overtly male. He wondered if that accounted for the difference in size and color. He couldn't say he'd been paying close attention to what gender the majority of the howlers were. If the ginger coloration was unique to females, this was the only one they had seen. Jack couldn't help but wonder why only one, whether red was a female look or not. Why only one?
Daniel looked at the ground for a moment, then started drawing in the dirt. Jack recognized some of the writing, because portions of it used the Latin alphabet. He was also passably familiar with Goa'uld, not enough to read it really, but enough to recognize it when he saw it, and to know some of the warning labels when he saw them. Aramaic didn't look like anything but squiggly lines to him however. It flitted briefly through his mind that it was strange for him to know more of an alien language than one from Earth. But taken in context, maybe it wasn't so strange after all.
When Daniel had finished and leaned back, Ginger sat a moment, then scampered carefully around the writing to sit beside Daniel. It had been upside down for her until she moved to his angle. Still, it seemed very trusting of her to sit so close to Daniel.
Had it been Jack, it would have been the perfect opportunity to try and take a hostage using his knife... only he wasn't sure the howlers worked that way. They were just as likely to respond violently to threats as cooperatively. Possibly they wouldn't even understand the concept. When an animal saw someone it cared about in danger, the instinct was to attack the danger, and the animal couldn't understand that doing so might put the someone they cared about in more danger. Formerly human or not, it was unclear how much and what kind of intelligence the howlers had.
In any case, Jack felt a keen disinclination to assault this particular howler, not because she was female, but because she had been the only one so far that hadn't been jerking them around. From the start, she had seemed earnest in her attempts to communicate on even a minimal level with Daniel. It was through her that certain breakthroughs were achieved. Ginger had been the closest thing they'd had to an ally this entire time, and Jack was not one of those who could justify gaining the advantage at any cost under most circumstances. Not when there were other options.
Ginger cocked her head, looking at what Daniel had written. After a moment, she reached out and confidently altered some of the lettering. She hooted softly and looked at Daniel, as if checking to see whether or not he'd gotten it. Apparently the subtle changes also altered the meaning of what Daniel had said, because he erased and rewrote part of it. Ginger's eyes widened slightly and she made a little chirping sound in her throat, like she was thinking aloud.
She scooted back a pace, and wrote something under what Daniel had written. Daniel looked at it, and a quizzical look crossed his face. He wrote a short sentence that seemed to be an inquiry or request for clarification. Ginger erased a part of what she'd written, and apparently rephrased it. Daniel made a grunt of comprehension that sounded approximately like what Jack had heard the howlers do with each other sometimes, though he hadn't entirely realized what they were doing.
The process repeated, slowly at first, then with increasing pace as the two refined their written communication. From time to time they would pause and exchange words. Or, more accurately, Daniel would point to some writing and say a word or some words. Ginger would make some monkey sounds that were apparently words to the howlers, but hers seemed to be entire sentences based on the indication, like very short sounds contained a depth of meaning beyond what humans could do with single words most of the time. It was apparently an imperfect science, because every sound the howlers made changed its meaning depending on their intonation and the rest of their body language, whereas each word Daniel spoke had a strict dictionary definition regardless of what inflection he put on it.
Jack recalled that some of the Goa'uld language was like that. What few words of Goa'uld Jack thought he knew varied in their meaning depending on context and what other words might be strung into the sentence. From what he'd picked up off Teal'c and Daniel, Goa'uld was itself an impossible language, though Daniel said it was actually relatively simple once you grasped a few basic rules. Jack had mostly learned enough to know which buttons not to touch in the Pel'tak of a Ha'tak vessel.
In any case, Jack had no real concept of what Daniel and Ginger were talking about.
He just hoped the good doctor hadn't gotten distracted from the important stuff and started asking about the history and culture of the Bandar-Log while he was at it. The last thing he wanted to hear was that Daniel had come to appreciate their primitive but elegant society and wanted to stay. Actually the last thing he wanted to hear right now was that they were being fattened up for Thanksgiving like turkeys. But the other thing was somewhere near the top of the list of things he didn't want to hear.
He reminded himself that right now, Daniel had a mission given to him by his wife upon her death. So long as he had that floating somewhere in his mind, he was unlikely to suddenly decide to become one with the ape men. In fact, his focus in recent days had actually been a little bit scary because it wasn't like him. Being absent-minded and scatterbrained was par for the course with Daniel, but it occurred to Jack as he watched Daniel "talk" to Ginger that, in some ways, he really wasn't the same guy Jack had met all those years ago at the SGC when it was still mostly just an empty missile silo.
Looking at Daniel's face, especially the look in his eyes, Jack decided maybe he didn't have to worry.
Finally, just as Jack was beginning to think he might die from the boredom, Daniel reached out to write something, and Ginger stopped him, arresting the motion by grabbing his wrist with her hand. Daniel was obviously startled, the last time he'd actually been touched by one of the howlers was when Scar had gone after Jack and he'd gotten in the way. He looked at Ginger's eyes, trying to read her intention, and she looked back in a surprisingly human way.
Daniel sat back and withdrew his hand, and Ginger let go. Then she got up silently and went towards the gate, which was opened by howlers on the outside. She left without looking back or making another sound. Jack watched her go, then turned to Daniel.
"Well that was exciting," he muttered sarcastically.
"Actually it was," Daniel replied, "We can finally start talking to them."
"Start?" Jack sputtered, "Start? What the hell was all that writing if not starting?"
"Laying the foundation," Daniel said, "I needed to learn enough of her language to get her interested in learning mine, and make sure she realized I could learn to understand the sounds she makes, but I can't make them."
"That's it?" Jack demanded, astonished at the amount of time taken to convey so little.
"Her people have all spoken a single language for so long we're lucky they could even guess that we're not just making random sounds. Though actually the real luck is that one of the three languages they use in writing uses the Latin alphabet," he indicated the shoulder patch on his jacket, "They recognized some of the letters we were wearing."
"That's great, Daniel," Jack said, beginning to wonder if he'd been too optimistic earlier, "But what do they want with us, and are they going to let us go any time soon?"
Daniel start to say something, appeared to think better of it, then said, "She wouldn't tell me. I asked several times. That time she stopped me? I was asking what her people want with us. I think maybe I asked the same question too many times and she got annoyed with me."
"Yes," Jack said slowly, "I know the feeling."
