By the time they reached home, Jacob had worked himself into a state of extreme anxiety. He'd tried to concentrate on his grandkids and the park, but he had the feeling he hadn't succeeded very well. Selmak tried to help, but he couldn't reassure Jacob in one crucial area. It was true, Nelaris wouldn't choose to tell Mark the whole story without at least telling him first, but they couldn't be sure about Lee'al. They'd only known her a few months, after all, and if she insisted, Nelaris would probably acquiesce.
And whatever Lee'al decided to tell Mark, the chances of him taking it well were vanishingly small. The man was spoiling for a fight. If she told him the truth, he'd be mad because Jacob hadn't told him about such a life-altering event in the first place; if he'd been that mad about not knowing about a job, he'd be at least twice as mad not knowing his father was now (in some ways, at least) an alien. If she didn't tell him, he'd give her the same attitude he'd given Jacob and Sam. Except it would be worse, because she was the reason he was mad in the first place, and Mark had no familial bonds of affection with Lee'al to curb his anger even just a little. They'd dropped off Mary's friend first, to get her out of the line of fire if things were even half as bad as Jacob was expecting. A dozen scenarios of possible confrontations ran through his mind, each one more disastrous than the last.
Jacob's surprise was therefore very great when he walked in the door to see Mark and Lee'al sitting on the couch laughing, with at least a dozen forms of snack food open on the coffee table, pop in hand, with music playing. They were situated so that Lee'al's back was towards the front door, with Mark across from her.
Mark looked up at him and froze. But it wasn't out of anger; it seemed ... more uncertain. "Hi, Dad," he said as he reached over to stop the stereo. He glanced at Lee'al and gave her a small smile. Behind him, Jacob could sense the rest of the family pouring in the door behind him, staring at the scene. Brian peeked around his right side, Alyson was to his left, and Sam was behind her, tingling on his senses in the weird not-quite-Tok'ra way she did.
"Jacob," she said, turning towards him; except it wasn't Lee'al, it was Nelaris, complete with flanged voice and glowing eyes. As she turned, her left hand came into view; she was even wearing a ribbon device!
"Nelaris, what the hell are you doing?" Jacob demanded.
Her head dipped, and Lee'al took over. "Making peace with your son. Don't be mad at Nelaris; it was my idea and I insisted."
Jacob drew in a breath to launch into a blistering rebuke, but Lee'al held up a hand.
"Before you say anything, Jake, listen. If you can look me straight in the eye and say honestly and without reservation that you believe Mark had neither the right nor the need to know, that you don't believe he can be trusted with the information, and that the Tau'ri governments desire to keep this under wraps is the best decision possible, you may yell at me as much as you wish. If you can't, sit down and listen to your son for at least a little while before making any judgments." She folded her hands in her lap and looked at him expectantly.
Jacob stared at her, jaw clenched. Selmak had learned early on in their blending that when he got this mad, the best policy was generally to stay quiet and let Jacob sort it out on his own, but he could fell that Selmak wanted badly to say something. Well, what, wise guy?
##She does have a point, you know,## Selmak said delicately. ##I'm not necessarily agreeing with her, nor am I condoning her methods, but her point is worth considering. Besides, no amount of anger on your part can take it back, and Mark doesn't look angry. In fact, before he saw you, he looked more relaxed and at peace than I've ever seen him. The choice you have at this moment, it seems to me, is to either accept what's been done and take advantage of the situation to repair your relationship with Mark, or to get angry about it and possibly damage that relationship permanently. Nelaris and Lee'al can wait until we're alone to be dealt with.## Selmak tried to suppress a wave of heartache at the thought, but Jacob caught it anyway. At least, he assumed it came from Selmak; he might be wrong about that, and in the final analysis it didn't matter much.
Relationships among the Tok'ra were far more delicate than most human relationships, because of the nature of the host-symbiote bond and the fact that there were twice as many people involved. They were especially fragile when a new host was involved. Something like this could break a relationship, if it were allowed to. Selmak loved Nelaris very much, and was growing quite fond of Lee'al. Jacob knew this, for they loved as one. In the end, it was the thought of losing her as much as anything else that prompted him to close his mouth and give her a very old-fashioned look, before coming into the living room and sitting down on the recliner with his arms folded.
##Besides,## Selmak commented with a dash of humor, ##this way you can honestly say that it wasn't your idea. You can, in that curious Tau'ri phrase you use, 'have your cake and eat it too.' And I like cake.##
Jacob held back a smile. Right. Just as long as you take care of the extra calories before they find their way to my midsection, you can eat all the cake you want. He and Lee'al, he realized, were the only two people in the room who weren't tense with anticipation. "So, Mark, how're you taking this?"
"I think I'm still in shock over meeting my first alien," Mark said, eyeing him as if he thought his father would burst out in anger at any moment.
"Well, technically speaking, she isn't your first alien," Jacob said. "She's your third."
"The first I knew about, then."
"You appear to be taking it ... better than I would have assumed," Jacob said cautiously.
"Were you expecting him to throw a fit and become even angrier?" Lee'al asked.
"Something like that, yeah," Jacob said. "It's certainly about how he's reacted to every other serious discussion I've tried to have with him lately."
"You're always too pessimistic, Jake," she replied, flipping a lock of hair over her shoulder. "Sometimes it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."
"She's an alien?" Brian stared at her, then turned to Jacob. "Your girlfriend is an alien? This is so cool."
"She doesn't look like one," Mary observed, studying her skeptically.
"Well, her voice is funny now," Brian retorted. "Maybe she's some kind of shape-shifter. You know, like Odo on DS9."
"Mark, is this some kind of joke?" Alyson asked.
"No, Alyson, it's no joke." Jacob caught Sam's eye and shrugged. Her eyes were wide, and she was obviously trying to think of some way to salvage the situation. "Sam, what's done is done. I think the only way to handle things at this point is to swear everybody to secrecy and tell them the truth. If you're worried, I'll call George and explain the whole thing to him."
"Right," Sam said, coming around to stand by Jacob.
"Make yourselves comfortable," Jacob said to Alyson and the kids, who were still standing in the door. Once they had found seats, he went on. "First, the fact that the US Air Force has been sending people on missions to other planets and dealing heavily with aliens is extremely classified. Which is why you're only hearing about this now, and why you wouldn't have heard anything even now if Lee'al," and here Jacob bared his teeth at her; this was not over, and they would be having a very serious talk later when they were alone, "hadn't spilled the beans. So before we tell you anything else, you have to all promise that you won't say a word of this to anyone. I imagine first thing in the morning we'll be faxed some documents that you will all have to sign, agreeing never to reveal any of this without prior permission. That right, Sammy?"
She nodded.
"But we can talk about this among the family, right?" Mary asked. "I mean, those of us who are going to know, not, like, cousins or my other grandparents or anything."
"Yes," Sam said, "as long as you're careful that no one can overhear you, and as long as you understand that you'll be told the basic background information only. We still can't tell you anything related to ongoing or current operations."
"So how long have you known about aliens, Sam?" Alyson asked, in kind of a daze.
"About ten years, now."
"She was the one who got me involved," Jacob said. "Now, I need promises from each of you."
"I promise," said Mark.
"So do I," said Brian.
"Me, too," said Mary.
After a pause, Mark said "Alyson? Honey?"
"Hm?" She shook her head. "Oh. Yes, of course. I promise not to talk about this."
"Good." Jacob rubbed his hands together. "Well, the short version is that some time ago the Air Force got its hands on an alien device that had been buried for thousands of years. About nine years ago, they figured out how to make it work. Turns out, there are Stargates (that's what the device is called) throughout the galaxy on thousands of planets. It works kind of like a telephone. You dial up the stargate you want to go to, and it establishes a wormhole to the stargate on the other planet. You can just walk through, and let me tell you, that first trip through is pretty wild."
"We figured out pretty quickly that the galaxy is not a safe place," Sam said, joining in. "There's a lot of bad guys out there, some really nasty ones. For example, the dominant species in the Galaxy are the Goa'uld, snake-like parasites who enslave humans and masquerade as gods. There are humans all over the galaxy, most still slaves to the Goa'uld, who are descended from people the Goa'uld took from Earth long ago. Unfortunately, our very first mission alerted them that we were still around, and were now at a high enough technological level to be a threat to them. So we formed Stargate Command, the SGC, which is where I've been stationed for the past eight years. Our mission is to send teams out into the galaxy to look for allies and any technology that might be useful."
"Sam commands SG-1, the SGC's flagship team," Jacob said, giving Sam a proud smile. "Anyway, that's where I come in. You see, a long time ago a Goa'uld queen named Egeria realized that the Goa'uld were evil and needed to be brought down. She broke from Goa'uld society and created a resistance movement, called the Tok'ra. Don't call them Goa'uld, by the way; it's a huge insult. Anyway, instead of taking hosts by force and suppressing their personality completely as the Goa'uld do, the Tok'ra only take people who want to be blended, and share the body equally. There are some pretty cool perqs, too, like a greatly extended life and the ability to heal just about any disease or injury."
"The ease with which we can heal human bodies is the main reason we chose them as hosts in the first place," Nelaris broke in.
"She's one of these Tok'ra," Mark put in. "And apparently, so is Granddad, now, too."
"So, it's a symbiotic relationship?" Brian asked eagerly. "Like Dax on Star Trek?"
"I'm afraid I'm not very familiar with Star Trek," Jacob said with a smile.
"From how Lee'al explains it, not exactly," Mark said. "The host and symbiote have their own thoughts, though they do share emotions. It is kind of similar, though; for example, trying to remove the symbiote can kill the host, and the symbiote can live for hundreds of years."
"Thousands, actually," Lee'al corrected him. "My symbiote's name is Nelaris; you can tell she's in control when my voice sounds strange, or my eyes glow. Generally, when we switch control from one to the other, my head dips a little. Jake's symbiote is named Selmak."
"What's it like, Granddad?" Brian asked eagerly.
"It's kind of strange, at first," Jacob admitted. "But you get used to it pretty fast. Having my cancer gone was wonderful, and I didn't miss my arthritis, either, I can tell you. And Selmak was still kind of weak from the death of his previous host and the effort of healing me for the first few days, so he was pretty quiet, which gave me a bit of time to get used to the idea of sharing my head with someone else. Which I appreciated. I went from not knowing aliens existed to being one in under three hours, and the transition took some getting used to." He shook his head. "I had no idea what I was getting myself into when Sam and George Hammond came to me in the hospital with their proposition. I went through the Gate for the first time, met—and blended with—Selmak, and escaped in the nick of time from a Goa'uld attack without having a second to catch my breath.
"Then I went on with Garshaw—her host's name is Yosuf; she's a member of the Tok'ra High council—to the new Tok'ra base, and it wasn't until I was there and in the process of settling in that I realized just how far from home I was. I was, literally, the only person from Earth on an alien world." He sighed. "Selmak helped, a lot. I mean, he's an alien himself, but he's also the closest, best friend I've ever had." Selmak sent a tingle of warmth in thanks for that description. "That's the way blendings are supposed to be, you know, and I'm very grateful it happened that way. If it had been some other symbiote that needed a host at the time I needed a symbiote ... things could have been very different.
"Selmak's got a great sense of humor, and he's very smart. He's been called "the oldest and wisest" of the Tok'ra, and I tease him about it sometimes, but I've come to rely heavily on his advice and judgment. I've always been a stubborn son-of-a-bitch and pretty rough around the edges. I'm still the same person, definitely, but being blended with Selmak has sort of sanded down the worst of it." Jacob shrugged. "I'm not sure how much else there is I can tell you—most of it, you have to experience to understand."
"Do you guys share the same thoughts?" Brian asked.
Jacob shook his head. "No. We don't. Emotions, yes; it's pretty much impossible to tell which emotions come from which person, and after a while you stop trying to figure it out because when you get down to it, it's kind of irrelevant. For example, love for you guys we can pretty much assume originates with me, because you're my family, but since Selmak feels it just as intensely and immediately as I do, it belongs to him as much as to me. But we each have our own thoughts, though we can choose to share them, and often do."
Lee'al cleared her throat. "Now, before you guys got home, I was going to demonstrate this to Mark." She raised the hand wearing the ribbon device. "It's a weapon called a 'ribbon' or 'hand' device, and only people with symbiotes can use them. Would you like to see it?"
"What were you planning on demonstrating with?" Sam asked. "It's not exactly an easy weapon to dial down the power on."
"Sam, you sound like you have personal experience," Alyson said in surprise.
Sam cocked her head. "I was briefly host to a Tok'ra named Jolinar. She died within me, leaving behind a few things including memories, a protein marker, and enough Naquadah to use Goa'uld and Tok'ra technology such as the ribbon device."
"Well, there's a tree in the back yard that we're pretty sure is dead, and we've been meaning to get rid of it for a year or so." Mark smiled. "I think that would be a great thing to demonstrate it on. Then you can use the zat to get rid of it."
Selmak took over. "You wish to use deadly alien weapons to do yard work?" he said with some humor.
Mark jumped a little to hear an alien voice coming from his father, but shrugged. "Hey, whatever works. Besides, I'm sure the kids and Alyson will want to see it in action, and that's something we want to get rid of, anyway. You don't have to worry about damaging anything."
"You have a point," Jacob acknowledged, getting to his feet. "Shall we?"
"This is so cool," Brian said as he sprang up. "I can't wait to see this."