His excellency, the duke of Ankh, Commander Sir Samuel Vimes of the Ankh Morpork City watch looked across his desk at his second in charge. Between them, the load of unattended paper work marred part of his view, but even just the small part of Captain Carrot that was visible to Vimes, was a treat. Captain Carrot's hair was a mess. His face still carried smudges of custard and charcoal. A blob marred his right eyebrow and another one decorated the tip of his left ear. His breast-plate was not it's normal, gleaming, self. He had a splotch of water smeared yellow paint on his side and a 'kick me' sticker hanging off his back. The whole package was completed by the expression of woebegone contrition he wore upon his face.
Sergeant Angua sat beside Carrot, looking like a naughty schoolgirl caught out with her boyfriend. She was similarly dishevelled. Her normally immaculately groomed hair was a bird's nest of tangles and had been speckled with spatterings of blue and orange paint. She had managed to clean the soot and custard off her face with more success than Carrot, but someone had made a pretty substantial attempt to fill her decolletage with custard. Some of it still stained the 'neckline' (for want of a term to describe something that was closer to her belly button than her collar bones) of her dress.
Vimes wasn't smiling. His long mournful face would look odd should he ever crack so much as a smile. With all those vertical lines it would look like a banana trying to squeeze through a picket fence while lying down. But on the inside…? That was another matter.
His finger tapped a single sheet of paper that sat upon his desk.
The heading on top of the paper read 'Incident report.' The ink was only just recently dry. Carrot's signature was at the bottom. The words between the heading and the signature were the subject of the conversation.
"It does not do the reputation of the City watch a lot of good to be involved in incidents like this one," Vimes said levelly.
"No sir," said Carrot.
"The worst part is that they got away."
"That's true sir," said Carrot.
"It wasn't really our fault," Angua said unwisely.
Vimes looked her way. It was a look that made a werewolf quail.
"Yes," Vimes said. "You had both Detritus and Dorfl outside the back door." His voice sampled some irony, then developed a severe case of irony overload. If there was much more irony in his words they'd be too heavy to get up his throat and out past his teeth. "It was such a pity they came through the front door. Now who was guarding the front door?" he made a show of reading from the report. "Why it was Captain Carrot, Sergeant Angua, Seargent Colon, Constable Visit and Constable Downspout."
"We didn't know they were clowns," argued Angua and then shut up because she could see how stupid that sounded. It was for Fool's guild they had invaded after all.
"You never thought to ask Downspout whether the people who dashed into the Fool's guild might have been actual Fools."
"Well the idea sort of occurred, sir," admitted Carrot. "He said they were fools. It's just that we took a different interpretation. It did seem pretty foolish of them to take a watchman hostage, so when Downspout said they were fools, I just thought…"
Literal as always, thought Vimes. Carrot and the English language would always struggle to understand one another. For a smart lad he could be unbelievably dense.
Vimes shook his head. "Get your selves cleaned up," he told them, "and meet me at the Patrician palace. We have a genuine emergency to attend to, apparently. We have to prepare for the arrival of a coach load of diplomats."
After the door closed behind the bedraggled pair, Vimes placed his face in his hands and laughed so hard he thought he might wet himself.
*
The team making up SG-1 stepped through the newly commissioned star gate and then moved cautiously into the room, taking up defensive positions one at a time in a perfectly executed leapfrog manoeuvre. They were all dressed in camouflaged combat fatigues, they each wore helmets with built in infrared and light enhancing goggles. On their backs they wore packs stocked with a host of measuring equipment and camping gear. They were also issued with a sub-machine gun capable of 1000 rounds per minute, a wickedly sharp carbon fibre knife and several ammunition belts that wrapped around their waists and crossed their chests. Each of the team's members held their guns at the ready when they appeared through the stargate portal. O'Neill had even made sure they had the safeties switched off.
"We come in peace," O'Neill said to no one in particular, which is a pretty dumb thing to say when you are waving a semi-automatic pistol and wearing enough ammunition to sustain a small guerilla war, but that's just his style.
'I don't think there's any one here," Daniel Jackson said. He looked around with vague interest. The scene before them might as well have been a nineteenth century University Dean's office. As someone who spent a large portion of his adult life ensconced in academia, Jackson wasn't all that enthusiastic about yet another one of those offices. They were places where old grey haired men ripped your thesis apart and attacked your skills abilities and your adulthood. He shuddered in reaction to a memory he wasn't going to share.
"I concur," said Teal'c, who had never set foot in a University, let alone an office in the inner sanctum.
"Yeah OK, I can see that," agreed O'Neill. He pulled his combat helmet off and slung it from his belt. He pulled a baseball cap from his pocket and stuck it on his head backwards. He pushed his sunglasses onto the top of his head, over his cap. "Makes a change from primeval landscapes or desert sand, no two ways about it." That was the predominant scenery on the far side of the gate.
Having made his fashion statement, O'Neill stepped further into the room. He fondled and looked at a few of the things he found scattered over the tables, the benches and also piled into the corners of the room. In some respects he is still waiting to grow up, having a lot in common with a six-year-old in a knick-knack shop whose parents struggle to listen to the store owner while trying to make sure that their progeny don't break, bounce or swallow any of the merchandice. "What is this place?" O'Neill said finally. He picked among the scattered drawings and then drew one from amongst some sort of half finished piece of machinery. He looked at it closely. It appeared to be an engineering drawing, with sections and enlarged views, finished with numbered parts and little manufacturing notations. He didn't recognise the language. "Sam. Can you make out what any of this stuff is?"
Samantha picked up another sheet of paper and glanced at it quickly. "I think so, yes sir." She turned it through ninety degrees and then ninety more. She tilted her head another forty five degrees and then back to vertical.
"What language is it in?" O'Neill directed the question at Daniel Jackson.
"English," Daniel answered. He handled one of the scraps of paper himself. His tone was less than certain.
"English?" asked O'Neill. He took another look. His head followed the same tilting pattern that Samantha Carter had made.
"Written backward," Daniel explained.
"O. K," said O'Neill very slowly. He put the piece of paper back on the desk and then patted it once as if to say nice doggie, just stay. "I guess that makes a real pleasant change from pictures and hieroglyphics." He turned to Samantha. "See if you can work out what this stuff says while we take a look around."
She nodded. "OK." She pulled a chair from beneath a table and began unpacking her gear. Within seconds the top of the table looked like someone had disembowelled a television set and then scattered the entrails across the table.
O'Neill had no idea how she managed to sort through all that crap and still get results out of it. Sometimes he thought that the answers she seemed to be able to sprout to his questions were just guesses and the rest of the paraphernalia was for show. He would be none the wiser if that were true.
He looked around the room and tried to decide which was the best direction for them to head.
The room had a single window that overlooked an ornamental garden. Something about the perspective of the garden didn't look right, but O'Neill couldn't place the problem his eyes were having with the scenery at that time. He had bigger problems to content with.
There was only the one door. He stepped up to it. The handle moved at his touch. It wasn't locked.
"We'll only be gone an hour or so," he told Carter. "If you don't hear from us in that time you know what to do."
Samantha Carter grunted something inarticulately and resumed plugging circuit boards and cables together. The rest of the team was already gone as far as she was concerned. She had more important things to do than worry about where the men in her team might be prowling.
The three men slipped through the door, one behind the other in a typical military leapfrog manoeuvre. The door shut behind them with a subdued click.
Immediately after the door shut, Carter heard a series of scrapes, bangs, pauses, curses and one singular twanging noise. She looked up inquiringly, wondering for a moment what the hell that had all been about.
For some reason, understood only by the narrative gods, but totally opaque to mere mortals, a panicked chicken burst through the door, flapped once, squawked and then raced out through the open window and into the garden.
Samantha Carter's eyes tracked it's progress. She blinked a few times and that seemed to bring her intelligence back from whatever strange dimension it had gone upon seeing the chicken.
"How come they get to have all the fun?" She asked the piece of paper she held in her hand. It didn't answer her question. It just posed a few of its own.
She studied a drawing of the human body executed in intricate detail.
*
"One thing has always worried me about stargate travel," Jack O'Neill told Daniel Jackson.
Jackson, O'Neill and Teal'c walked between the haphazardly constructed buildings that seemed to lean on each other for support arrayed on either side of the street, and sometimes across it. The place was stark testimony to a lack of town planning and an architectural nightmare, or maybe it was a testimony to demonic town planning and an architect's nightmare. Jackson was unsure, but his mind was testing each theory.
"Only one thing?" Daniel asked. His tone was distracted and his attention was definitely somewhere else. His eyes tracked a tableau he had lit upon in the shadows between tow slightly skewed buildings. And it was a compelling sight; a glimpse of what he was convinced was a vampire just beginning to feed on a weakly struggling human victim. "No it couldn't be," he muttered to himself.
"Well more than one, naturally," O'Neill said in an equally vague tone. He saw the vampire as well and watched it closely when it raced away into the shadows. Being more inclined to believe his eyes than was Jackson, the presence of a vampire was cause to doubt their weaponry and the sense of this mission. "But one thing worries me more often than most of the other things that worry me."
Daniel puzzled that one through and then finally fell for the trap of asking. "What's that?" Instead of concentrating on O'Neill's very real concern, Jackson was thinking that his eyes must be paying tricks on his mind, or maybe he was losing the latter and he could look forward to a nice rest soon - in a room with soft walls while he sat inside it dressed in a jacket with really long sleeves.
O'Neill stopped in the middle of the road, turned suddenly to face Daniel Jackson. A horse drawn cart dodged him at the last moment. The driver let out a few colourful expletives and then was gone. A couple of errant cabbages fell to the road and bounced away. "How come everyone seems to speak English? I mean, the first time we came through the stargate, we took you along because we needed an Egyptologist and the people we came across couldn't speak English and you had to translate for us, right?"
"Right," Daniel was more interested in the steaming pile of organic fertiliser that the horse had decided use to decorate the road. O'Neill's feet were dangerously close to stepping in it. If he took one more backward pace…
O'Neill remained in the same place with his hands firmly wedged in his pockets. "But since then every one we come across can speak English."
Daniel looked at him with a question written all over his face. "Your point being?"
'Well…"
Daniel looked blank.
"OK…" O'Neill gestured for Daniel to take up the story.
Daniel still looked blank. "So what was it you wanted me to discuss."
O'Neill shook his head. "Nothing."
He turned and started walking across the road. One pace into his march he stopped. "Oh, sh…"
He was right.
*
The stargate SG-1 team continued their distracted march along the street.
"It might be Tudor era London," Daniel Jackson suggested. "We would need a historian rather than an archaeologist to check this place out."
"Were the Goa'uld active on earth that recently?" O'Neill asked Teal'c.
"Not that I'm aware," the Jaffa answered.
"Societies' evolve," Daniel reminded O'Neill.
"In parallel like this?" O'Neill asked bemused.
O'Neill had given up trying to clean his boots and was reasonably confident that he had scraped all the manure from them. It was just that he could still smell it; that was all. He hoped it was a phantom odour, a memory of what he had endured, although he wasn't so sure.
"I think that pile of rocks moved," Teal'c pointed toward a pile of rocks that someone had heaped reasonably neatly in a way that they almost filled an alley meandering between two building.
"What?" asked O'Neill.
"In there," Teal'c said, and pointed. His eyes tracked the pile of rocks in case they decided to move again.
"Is that relevant?" O'Neill asked.
"I don't know," the Jaffa said, "but I believe it should be investigated."
The three stargate officers backtracked along the road. They stopped and looked at the pile of rocks. They peered at it. Each of them touched it with their foot and then stepped back. Nothing happened.
O'Neill reached into the alley with the barrel of his semi-automatic and poked the pile of rocks a couple of time. Nothing happened. He poked again with the same result. He was losing interest fast.
"You're sure," he asked Teal'c. He had gone so far out through the other side of irony; he was bordering on sarcasm. "It moved?"
"I am certain Colonel O'Neill."
"Not doing it now." O'Neill peered closely at the pile of rocks. Once again, it repeated its lack of animation. O'Neill shook his head. "C'mon, we're wasting time."
They turned away and walked toward the bend in the road. "How is it that a city like this can evolve so close to the Tudor era on Earth that you can recognise it?" O'Neill said. "That's what I want to know? Propagation of Minoan culture, or extrapolation of ancient Egyptian I could understand. The Goa'uld took people from those eras, but this…" he finished with a gesture. Then he shrugged.
"I don't know," said Jackson.
"It's getting sosea watchman can't even go under the covers in dis town before people start poking him in a rocks," muttered Detritus the troll. He was disguised like a pile of rocks and staking out an alley that was reputedly used extensively in the slab trade. So far all he found was a lots of bemused expressions on the face of people walking past, and endured the occasional poke in the rocks from a toe or the occasional more-rigid object.
Daniel Jackson stopped in his tracks. He turned slowly. "Those rocks spoke," he said.
"It's just a pile of rocks," O'Neill said.
"Yeah but…"
"Rock's don't talk."
"Yeah but…"
"Well you can sit here and talk to them if you like…"
"Yeah but…"
"You coming?" A note of impatience had crept into his voice. "We need to find someone in authority."
O'Neill and Teal'c strode purposefully toward the next corner in the road. Daniel looked after them and then back along the road toward the entrance to the alley, indecisively. He shook his head and then continued trailing along behind O'Neill and Teal'c. All the way to the corner, Daniel was looking over his shoulder as though daring the rocks to speak again. He lingered at the bend, reluctant to make that last movement.
The stargate team rounded the corner and was gone from sight.
"Dat were close," said Detritus.
*
Samantha Carter pushed a strand of her hair behind her ear and looked at the data that she was being fed by her mess of instrumentation and from the spider-web of fibre-optic cabling. She pulled her radio from a pocket at the side of her trousers without taking her eyes off the instruments, as though she didn't trust them to read the same thing if she looked away and then back again.
"Colonel O'Neill," she called.
There was a few seconds of scratching static and then Jack's voice came through. "Here, Sam."
She pressed the transmit-button again. "I'm getting some bizarre readings on the fundamental constants of cosmology here."
There ensued one of those pauses while the other end of the conversation waits for the nonsense to make sense. It didn't happen. No subconscious programming could work its way through that lot. Which left O'Neill with plan B. "What does that mean in English?" He asked.
"We're obviously close to some sort of rift in space time," Samantha Carter transmitted.
Same pause, different time. "That was only marginally closer to English, Sam. How about we pretend - hypothetically you understand - that I don't have any idea what it is that you're talking about? Let's start from there."
Samantha took a deep breath. She was used to this sort of response for Jack. He was a great guy, and if they were thrown together without the military regulations regarding fraternisation they might have conducted a wholly different type of relationship, but there were times when she could beat his head with a blunt instrument. "Well the laws of physics don't seem to apply in quite the same way that I would normally expect them to. Things are not going to be quite the same as they are back home."
"OK. That sounds bad."
"It might be."
"Is that a doubt I hear?"
"Yeah, a bit. Look it's like this. Probability is all screwed up here. You might find improbable things happening."
This time there was a slightly different pause. It was the sort of pause you get where the other end of the conversation can't believe that they have been told something quite like what their ears insisted was just said.
"You mean more improbable than the stargate and Goa'uld and Teal'c and some of the other stuff we've encountered?"
"Much more so," Carter said emphatically.
"OK, that goes beyond bad," O'Neill decided. "That gets nearer to scary."
Samantha Carter clamped her bottom lip between her teeth. "Um, there's something else," she said finally. "I've been looking through the notes that the inventor of the new stargate left behind, and I get the feeling that they believe the world is carried on the back of four elephants that ride on the back of a giant turtle swimming through space."
Silence answered.
"O'Neill?"
"Daniel here," said Daniel. "I know that legend. I think I can place that one when we get back to base. We're talking about an ancient culture here. Very primitive belief system."
Daniel left the transmit button of the radio pressed so Carter heard the discussion between the three male members of the team.
"Daniel Jackson, I suggest that you remember that this ancient culture invented the stargate by themselves," Teal'c reminded Daniel.
"There is that I suppose,' said Daniel's voice.
"I wish you hadn't brought that up," O'Neill said.
*
O'Neill placed his radio back in the little pocket just above his left knee an re-fastened the fabric cover.
"We probably should try to find whoever's in charge here," O'Neill told Teal'c and Jackson. His gaze tracked from building to building. If he did that for too long he would get a crick in his neck from all the little jerky movements required to follow the building line. "These buildings all look the same."
"Like they're about to fall over," Daniel Jackson offered sardonically.
"Or catch alight," O'Neill agreed.
"This place looks like it's been built on top of itself over and over again," Daniel said. Near the footpath on the opposite side of the road he was sure he could see the top of a door way, barely a couple of centimetres above the pavement line. It was being used as a doorstep now. "I don't know of any human culture that does that."
"Is that important?" O'Neill asked.
"It could be of great cultural significance."
"Whatever," said O'Neill. "Look, if we're going to find someone in charge here, we need to ask somebody. I think that's the only way we're going to find out where the guy in-charge hides out. We'll try in a pub." He looked around, then pointed along the street. "That one."
The sign above the door said "The Mended Drum."
They pushed their way inside.