Several times SG-1 went to worlds where people lived in peacefully, almost
idyllically, and it seemed too good to be true. For those of us used to
human selfishness, it seemed impossible to believe that a world could exist
where people strove with all their might to make life better for everyone
else, not just for themselves.
-from Doorway to Heaven by General Jack O'Neill
Colonel Mark Farlow was annoyed that SG-2 had to work the holiday weekend. He should be at home celebrating and impressing his nieces and nephews with tales of his wonderful adventures through the Stargate. Just because he hadn't been part of the SGC on Freedom Day didn't mean he didn't deserve to celebrate. No one had been around on American Independence Day, but they still got to spend the weekend having fun.
Still, as he stepped out of the Gate on P2C-437, he didn't think it looked like this mission would take too long.
"You cannot carry weapons here." Mark spun round to face the speaker, his zat aimed. He saw a man wearing brown robes. He looked like some sort of monk. He looked no older than Mark, with just a few flecks of white in his brown hair and a few fine lines showing his age, but something about his eyes suggested he was far older.
"I am unarmed," the man continued, seeing the team's mistrust of him. "It is our second law that no one on Methudas can carry weapons."
"What's your first law?" Mark asked.
"That no person may intentionally hurt another. Even to bruise someone would be committing a great crime. If you wish to speak to the people of Methudas or merely stay on this planet, you must first leave your weapons here. If you do not trust us not to hurt you then you can return to your own world. But I give you my word that you will not be harmed during your stay here." Mark looked at the man, and then at his team. He didn't think this man was lying, but he didn't want to risk his team in an unknown situation either.
"What insurance do we have that you won't hurt us?"
"I can give you only my word." Mark thought for a few moments, and then put his zat down by the Gate. Matthews, Keeling and Lowe put theirs down with it. The man turned and led them away from the Gate, through pleasant grassland dotted with trees.
"What's your name?" Mark asked.
"My name is Rayel Thruth," the man said, "it means 'teacher from the stars'."
"Why?"
"I came from another world to Methudas, but now I teach the ways of Methudas to others. What is your name?"
"Colonel Mark Farlow. This is Major Richard Mathews, Lieutenant Sophie Keeling and Dr Frank Lowe."
"How did you come to be on Methudas?" Lowe asked.
"I was an explorer." Rayel explained, "I wanted to find knowledge that could be used to help people, but the leaders of my world were more interested in finding weapons to fight wars. I didn't approve, and when I found information describing Methudas I left my people and came here."
"And now you teach?" Lowe asked, "But if the people of Methudas already believe this stuff about not hurting people, who do you teach?"
"Whenever a subject is worth learning there will be people to learn it," Rayel said. He evaded them so well it took Mark a few minutes to realise that he hadn't actually answered the question.
"Where was your original home?" Keeling asked.
"Methudas was the first place I felt I belonged, so Methudas is the only place that has really been my home." Yet again, Rayel skilfully evaded answering. Mark wondered what he was hiding.
He forgot about that when they mounted a ridge and looked down at a settlement. There were a lot of low houses made of a white stone, but often with decorations made of other stones of different colours. They were built with no gardens or patches of land belong to them, the land seemed to have no owners. What surprised Mark most was that there were no streets. The areas between buildings were grassland, often planted with flowers, but there was no sign of transport to get around. Surrounding the settlement were fields of grain and vegetables. There didn't appear to be any technology.
"It's beautiful," Keeling said. Mark agreed with her: it looked so peaceful and contented. In a few minutes they were between the buildings and Mark decided they looked even nicer close up. Most of them had flowers next to them, or growing in window boxes, and colourful stones were placed in patterns to show flowers or trees on the walls. The whole place was filled with natural beauty.
They passed a large grass area where children were playing. Mark couldn't quite make out the rules of the game. There were three balls that they were throwing around between them and catching. One child might try to snatch a ball away from one player, and then throw it to him a minute later. As they were watching, he saw a board at one side of the playing field. This board kept changing colours on its own, seemingly randomly. Perhaps they weren't as primitive as he'd thought.
Suddenly, girl snatched a ball of a younger boy. That boy tried to grab it back, but slipped and fell. There was no referee's whistle, the game just stopped instantly. The girl rushed back to him.
"I'm sorry."
"We're not playing cadge," the boy said, getting up.
"I'm still sorry." The boy had a bruise growing on his cheek, but appeared to be OK. The board had frozen on green, and the girl handed the ball to the boy. The board changed to purple and the balls started moving again. Mark was surprised to see the boy immediately throw the ball to the girl.
"What's cadge?" Keeling asked Rayel, "Is it another game?"
"I've explained that hurting others is against the law on Methudas, but this game is often violent. Children can choose to play 'no cadge' which means no one is held responsible for any accidental injuries they cause." That made sense to Mark.
They continued to walk through the settlement and Rayel turned to other matters. "Will you be staying here long enough to require a place to sleep?"
"We're supposed to be here forty-eight hours," Mark said.
"Then I will go and arrange rooms for you," Rayel said. "Feel free to go anywhere you like. If you want to know about things just ask and my people will be glad to help you." Then he turned and left.
"Well, he seemed friendly," said Lowe.
"Yeah," replied Mark, "I wonder what he was hiding."
"Maybe we should find out," suggested Keeling.
Most of the buildings in Methudas looked like they were probably family homes, but some were larger than the others. Mark guessed that those would be the public buildings where important business was done. At any rate, it was as good a place to start as any. The first building was lined with long tables and looked like a dining room of some sort. They tried a door in the back and decided that guess was probably right. The door led to what was definitely a kitchen, even if the machines were far more advanced than anything on Earth. There were things that could possibly be ovens, and various other pieces of equipment he guessed were for food preparation. It was the containers of food lying around that showed what the room was. For a world that looked so primitive they certainly had a lot of technology.
The next building contained some machines that were probably computers. A couple of people were working at them.
"Can we help you?" one asked.
"We're just looking around," Mark said. He contemplated asking them some stuff, but if they were hiding anything they probably wouldn't just tell them what it was, so he waved the team out.
A few of the large buildings were storerooms. The doors were sealed, but windows in the doors showed crates or sacks. Most were labelled, but that didn't help as the labels were in some language that even Lowe didn't recognise. He normally started going on about how it could possibly be related to some long dead language when facing alien writings. This time he just looked at it and said it was like nothing he'd ever seen before.
Another building was a school. Groups of children were in different rooms studying different things. Mark looked in one door and saw a teacher pointed out things on a 3D hologram of the galaxy to children who were either talking or on the point of falling asleep. Apparently school was boring no matter where in the universe it was.
The town was large, and they'd barely started looking round when a bell sounded. People came out of houses and buildings and walked in the same direction.
"Maybe it's some sort of religious event," Lowe suggested.
"Maybe," Mark agreed, and led the team in the same direction everyone else was going. It turned out not to be anything religious, unless these people worshipped food. They ended up in a dinning room similar to the one they'd been in earlier, but not quite the same. Food was laid out on the tables and everyone was bustling around talking to each other and looking for places to sit.
"See what you can find out," Mark said, and they spread out to different tables. He sat down next to a man who was trying to convince a teenage girl to sit with him. The girl eventually stalked off and went to sit with a group of her own age at another table.
"Kids," Mark muttered.
"Do you have children?" the man asked.
"No, but I've enough nephews and nieces to know what hassle they can be."
"Sadir is growing up, and claims I want to stop her. Perhaps I do, but I can't help thinking about her as my little girl." The man had a slight dreamy look on his face. This wasn't telling him anything other than parents had the same problems whatever planet they were on.
"Have you always lived here?" Mark asked.
"All my life. My father's family have been here so long no one can remember when they came, but my mother was an offworlder. One of Methudas's teachers went through the Stargate to try and teach others our ways. My mother was one of those who came here."
"Do a lot of people come here from off-world?"
"Quite a lot. Many leave again, and go back to their own worlds to teach there what they learned here. Most of those who stay often come from worlds destroyed by war."
"So they come to a world where war never happens." The man nodded. Mark realised that most people were eating, so he began to help himself to what was on offer. One of the first things you learned at the SGC was not to be afraid to try different things on other planets. The food was actually quite good, even if he had no idea what any of it was.
"Do you ever have any problems with crime here?" Mark asked.
The man laughed. "No, the only incident of violence in my lifetime was when a three year old boy hit another child. He wasn't punished, being so young. We never have any thieving, because the society work together to produce all that we need and we share all that we have."
"How do you maintain such good order?"
"Our whole society is based on peace. Everyone who lives here does so because he or she doesn't want to live on a world where violence is common."
"What about threats from off-world? The Goa'uld?"
"We are defended. There is a shield around the Stargate that activates if someone comes through carrying weapons. No one can get through the shield, so anyone with hostile intent is forced to leave again. And no one can attack from space because of a similar shield." This sounded promising.
"Our people are interested in trading technology. Would it be possible for us to learn about how this shield works?"
"You would have to ask the teachers. I expect they will allow it." It would be great if they could. The research centre on 813 was trying to find a way to build an energy shield, but they had nothing that could protect a planet. The naquadriah research had yet yielded a stable enough form of energy. They talked through dinner, but the conversation turned to matters of little interest to Earth's leadership. Still, Mark would try to find out what he could about the shield. When dinner was over he went outside with the team.
"What did you find out?" he asked.
"This place is as peaceful as possible," Keeling said.
"There are people from all sorts of different places. There is no trace of any Earth-based culture, it seems their whole society has come into being around the basis of having peace," Lowe said.
"The people are happy here," Matthews added.
"Well, I've found out that there's a defence shield surrounding this entire planet and another one by the Stargate in case anyone tries to attack, but no weapons of any sort."
"Colonel Farlow." Mark turned and saw Rayel coming up to them. "I was wondering if you would like to see your rooms."
"Yes, thank-you," Mark said. His suspicions of Rayel had disappeared during the day, when he'd seen what a paradise this planet was. He doubted anyone would even think about doing something to threaten his team.
***
The colonel and Frank had gone to discuss the shield with the teachers, leaving Sophie and Richard to explore the city some more. They'd had a wonderful night's sleep and another good breakfast. Everyone was so cheerful and happy that Sophie could almost believe this was a paradise world. If ever she wanted to retire off-world, she'd pick this planet.
They saw children playing the same game they'd been playing the previous day and stopped to watch. They weren't in any rush to finish searching. Sophie began to notice a pattern in the seemingly random throwing. A child who tried to snatch the ball when the board was purple would be involved in the throwing the rest of the time. Sophie guessed that the changing colours were a way of changing who was 'it'.
The game ended when an adult came out an ushered the children into school, and the two from Earth continued their search. They went into a large building. A woman in something that looked similar to a labcoat was looking at information on a screen. The information was in graphs, symbols and alien writings that neither could make any sense of.
They went on through the room, and opened a door at the back. The first thing they saw was Rayel, standing in front of tanks filled with a light green liquid in which fish were swimming. The next thing they saw was that the fish weren't fish at all. Sophie's heart leapt in fear at things that she had only hitherto seen in pictures. Things Earth believed destroyed.
Goa'uld!
Colonel Mark Farlow was annoyed that SG-2 had to work the holiday weekend. He should be at home celebrating and impressing his nieces and nephews with tales of his wonderful adventures through the Stargate. Just because he hadn't been part of the SGC on Freedom Day didn't mean he didn't deserve to celebrate. No one had been around on American Independence Day, but they still got to spend the weekend having fun.
Still, as he stepped out of the Gate on P2C-437, he didn't think it looked like this mission would take too long.
"You cannot carry weapons here." Mark spun round to face the speaker, his zat aimed. He saw a man wearing brown robes. He looked like some sort of monk. He looked no older than Mark, with just a few flecks of white in his brown hair and a few fine lines showing his age, but something about his eyes suggested he was far older.
"I am unarmed," the man continued, seeing the team's mistrust of him. "It is our second law that no one on Methudas can carry weapons."
"What's your first law?" Mark asked.
"That no person may intentionally hurt another. Even to bruise someone would be committing a great crime. If you wish to speak to the people of Methudas or merely stay on this planet, you must first leave your weapons here. If you do not trust us not to hurt you then you can return to your own world. But I give you my word that you will not be harmed during your stay here." Mark looked at the man, and then at his team. He didn't think this man was lying, but he didn't want to risk his team in an unknown situation either.
"What insurance do we have that you won't hurt us?"
"I can give you only my word." Mark thought for a few moments, and then put his zat down by the Gate. Matthews, Keeling and Lowe put theirs down with it. The man turned and led them away from the Gate, through pleasant grassland dotted with trees.
"What's your name?" Mark asked.
"My name is Rayel Thruth," the man said, "it means 'teacher from the stars'."
"Why?"
"I came from another world to Methudas, but now I teach the ways of Methudas to others. What is your name?"
"Colonel Mark Farlow. This is Major Richard Mathews, Lieutenant Sophie Keeling and Dr Frank Lowe."
"How did you come to be on Methudas?" Lowe asked.
"I was an explorer." Rayel explained, "I wanted to find knowledge that could be used to help people, but the leaders of my world were more interested in finding weapons to fight wars. I didn't approve, and when I found information describing Methudas I left my people and came here."
"And now you teach?" Lowe asked, "But if the people of Methudas already believe this stuff about not hurting people, who do you teach?"
"Whenever a subject is worth learning there will be people to learn it," Rayel said. He evaded them so well it took Mark a few minutes to realise that he hadn't actually answered the question.
"Where was your original home?" Keeling asked.
"Methudas was the first place I felt I belonged, so Methudas is the only place that has really been my home." Yet again, Rayel skilfully evaded answering. Mark wondered what he was hiding.
He forgot about that when they mounted a ridge and looked down at a settlement. There were a lot of low houses made of a white stone, but often with decorations made of other stones of different colours. They were built with no gardens or patches of land belong to them, the land seemed to have no owners. What surprised Mark most was that there were no streets. The areas between buildings were grassland, often planted with flowers, but there was no sign of transport to get around. Surrounding the settlement were fields of grain and vegetables. There didn't appear to be any technology.
"It's beautiful," Keeling said. Mark agreed with her: it looked so peaceful and contented. In a few minutes they were between the buildings and Mark decided they looked even nicer close up. Most of them had flowers next to them, or growing in window boxes, and colourful stones were placed in patterns to show flowers or trees on the walls. The whole place was filled with natural beauty.
They passed a large grass area where children were playing. Mark couldn't quite make out the rules of the game. There were three balls that they were throwing around between them and catching. One child might try to snatch a ball away from one player, and then throw it to him a minute later. As they were watching, he saw a board at one side of the playing field. This board kept changing colours on its own, seemingly randomly. Perhaps they weren't as primitive as he'd thought.
Suddenly, girl snatched a ball of a younger boy. That boy tried to grab it back, but slipped and fell. There was no referee's whistle, the game just stopped instantly. The girl rushed back to him.
"I'm sorry."
"We're not playing cadge," the boy said, getting up.
"I'm still sorry." The boy had a bruise growing on his cheek, but appeared to be OK. The board had frozen on green, and the girl handed the ball to the boy. The board changed to purple and the balls started moving again. Mark was surprised to see the boy immediately throw the ball to the girl.
"What's cadge?" Keeling asked Rayel, "Is it another game?"
"I've explained that hurting others is against the law on Methudas, but this game is often violent. Children can choose to play 'no cadge' which means no one is held responsible for any accidental injuries they cause." That made sense to Mark.
They continued to walk through the settlement and Rayel turned to other matters. "Will you be staying here long enough to require a place to sleep?"
"We're supposed to be here forty-eight hours," Mark said.
"Then I will go and arrange rooms for you," Rayel said. "Feel free to go anywhere you like. If you want to know about things just ask and my people will be glad to help you." Then he turned and left.
"Well, he seemed friendly," said Lowe.
"Yeah," replied Mark, "I wonder what he was hiding."
"Maybe we should find out," suggested Keeling.
Most of the buildings in Methudas looked like they were probably family homes, but some were larger than the others. Mark guessed that those would be the public buildings where important business was done. At any rate, it was as good a place to start as any. The first building was lined with long tables and looked like a dining room of some sort. They tried a door in the back and decided that guess was probably right. The door led to what was definitely a kitchen, even if the machines were far more advanced than anything on Earth. There were things that could possibly be ovens, and various other pieces of equipment he guessed were for food preparation. It was the containers of food lying around that showed what the room was. For a world that looked so primitive they certainly had a lot of technology.
The next building contained some machines that were probably computers. A couple of people were working at them.
"Can we help you?" one asked.
"We're just looking around," Mark said. He contemplated asking them some stuff, but if they were hiding anything they probably wouldn't just tell them what it was, so he waved the team out.
A few of the large buildings were storerooms. The doors were sealed, but windows in the doors showed crates or sacks. Most were labelled, but that didn't help as the labels were in some language that even Lowe didn't recognise. He normally started going on about how it could possibly be related to some long dead language when facing alien writings. This time he just looked at it and said it was like nothing he'd ever seen before.
Another building was a school. Groups of children were in different rooms studying different things. Mark looked in one door and saw a teacher pointed out things on a 3D hologram of the galaxy to children who were either talking or on the point of falling asleep. Apparently school was boring no matter where in the universe it was.
The town was large, and they'd barely started looking round when a bell sounded. People came out of houses and buildings and walked in the same direction.
"Maybe it's some sort of religious event," Lowe suggested.
"Maybe," Mark agreed, and led the team in the same direction everyone else was going. It turned out not to be anything religious, unless these people worshipped food. They ended up in a dinning room similar to the one they'd been in earlier, but not quite the same. Food was laid out on the tables and everyone was bustling around talking to each other and looking for places to sit.
"See what you can find out," Mark said, and they spread out to different tables. He sat down next to a man who was trying to convince a teenage girl to sit with him. The girl eventually stalked off and went to sit with a group of her own age at another table.
"Kids," Mark muttered.
"Do you have children?" the man asked.
"No, but I've enough nephews and nieces to know what hassle they can be."
"Sadir is growing up, and claims I want to stop her. Perhaps I do, but I can't help thinking about her as my little girl." The man had a slight dreamy look on his face. This wasn't telling him anything other than parents had the same problems whatever planet they were on.
"Have you always lived here?" Mark asked.
"All my life. My father's family have been here so long no one can remember when they came, but my mother was an offworlder. One of Methudas's teachers went through the Stargate to try and teach others our ways. My mother was one of those who came here."
"Do a lot of people come here from off-world?"
"Quite a lot. Many leave again, and go back to their own worlds to teach there what they learned here. Most of those who stay often come from worlds destroyed by war."
"So they come to a world where war never happens." The man nodded. Mark realised that most people were eating, so he began to help himself to what was on offer. One of the first things you learned at the SGC was not to be afraid to try different things on other planets. The food was actually quite good, even if he had no idea what any of it was.
"Do you ever have any problems with crime here?" Mark asked.
The man laughed. "No, the only incident of violence in my lifetime was when a three year old boy hit another child. He wasn't punished, being so young. We never have any thieving, because the society work together to produce all that we need and we share all that we have."
"How do you maintain such good order?"
"Our whole society is based on peace. Everyone who lives here does so because he or she doesn't want to live on a world where violence is common."
"What about threats from off-world? The Goa'uld?"
"We are defended. There is a shield around the Stargate that activates if someone comes through carrying weapons. No one can get through the shield, so anyone with hostile intent is forced to leave again. And no one can attack from space because of a similar shield." This sounded promising.
"Our people are interested in trading technology. Would it be possible for us to learn about how this shield works?"
"You would have to ask the teachers. I expect they will allow it." It would be great if they could. The research centre on 813 was trying to find a way to build an energy shield, but they had nothing that could protect a planet. The naquadriah research had yet yielded a stable enough form of energy. They talked through dinner, but the conversation turned to matters of little interest to Earth's leadership. Still, Mark would try to find out what he could about the shield. When dinner was over he went outside with the team.
"What did you find out?" he asked.
"This place is as peaceful as possible," Keeling said.
"There are people from all sorts of different places. There is no trace of any Earth-based culture, it seems their whole society has come into being around the basis of having peace," Lowe said.
"The people are happy here," Matthews added.
"Well, I've found out that there's a defence shield surrounding this entire planet and another one by the Stargate in case anyone tries to attack, but no weapons of any sort."
"Colonel Farlow." Mark turned and saw Rayel coming up to them. "I was wondering if you would like to see your rooms."
"Yes, thank-you," Mark said. His suspicions of Rayel had disappeared during the day, when he'd seen what a paradise this planet was. He doubted anyone would even think about doing something to threaten his team.
***
The colonel and Frank had gone to discuss the shield with the teachers, leaving Sophie and Richard to explore the city some more. They'd had a wonderful night's sleep and another good breakfast. Everyone was so cheerful and happy that Sophie could almost believe this was a paradise world. If ever she wanted to retire off-world, she'd pick this planet.
They saw children playing the same game they'd been playing the previous day and stopped to watch. They weren't in any rush to finish searching. Sophie began to notice a pattern in the seemingly random throwing. A child who tried to snatch the ball when the board was purple would be involved in the throwing the rest of the time. Sophie guessed that the changing colours were a way of changing who was 'it'.
The game ended when an adult came out an ushered the children into school, and the two from Earth continued their search. They went into a large building. A woman in something that looked similar to a labcoat was looking at information on a screen. The information was in graphs, symbols and alien writings that neither could make any sense of.
They went on through the room, and opened a door at the back. The first thing they saw was Rayel, standing in front of tanks filled with a light green liquid in which fish were swimming. The next thing they saw was that the fish weren't fish at all. Sophie's heart leapt in fear at things that she had only hitherto seen in pictures. Things Earth believed destroyed.
Goa'uld!