XV
A single O'Neill, Teal'c had frequently observed, was a trial to coexist with on long, uneventful journeys. Two of them together could have made a vessel the size of a ha'tak seem crowded. Even - or, indeed, especially - when both were feeling unwell.
O'Neill and his clone were avoiding each other, a state of affairs that Daniel Jackson continually sought to remedy, but Teal'c, perhaps selfishly, preferred to see continue. It distressed him to see his brother's discomfort in the presence of his duplicate. Daniel Jackson spoke teasingly of alpha males and pack behaviour, but Teal'c believed his affection for O'Neill blinded him to a more troubling truth.
O'Neill was uncomfortable with his double because O'Neill was uncomfortable with himself.
And - as befitted one with the soul of a warrior - when faced with something that disturbed him, he made ready to attack. Albeit not always against the most sensible of opponents.
"I do not believe this is wise, young O'Neill," Teal'c said gravely, intent on not giving the appearance of casual dismissal. Even when not at the height of his fitness, O'Neill could be relied upon to make a fearsome opponent. However, while the adult O'Neill had hidden power to his slender frame, his younger clone had yet to acquire the muscle development that would come with full maturity. Physical size was a limited advantage - Teal'c was well aware he would have won almost every contest of his life if it were not so - but he feared that his warrior brother's clone would expect his new body to achieve feats it was not yet fully capable of.
He had witnessed this behaviour in O'Neill many times, when recovering from injuries. The Jaffa knew little of rehabilitation: wounds and sicknesses came in two groups, those that healed quickly and those that were kek. To be weak was to die. But among the Tauri, even minor hurts healed slowly - and so they had never learned to draw such a line between lesser and greater injury. Teal'c had seen and marvelled at machines to breathe air for lungs that could not, to clean blood that the body could not clean itself, to shock life into a heart that no longer wished to beat. To the Tauri, all things were to be fought and overcome.
And to O'Neill, all things were to be overcome here, now, today, even when the wisdom of experience suggested otherwise.
"Oh, come on, T, give me a break." The young O'Neill threw his hands out wide, a gesture even more exaggerated than those of his adult counterpart. Teal'c wondered if frustration and youthful exuberance made it so, or whether his brother had withdrawn even more in his months since becoming General than they had fully realised. "I gotta work off some energy here!"
"Perhaps Daniel Jackson or Colonel Carter could assist you," Teal'c suggested. The young O'Neill folded his arms.
"I can't spar with Daniel! Even if he has got muscles now." Teal'c was forced to admit that this was true. Daniel Jackson had become a warrior that no man or Jaffa could feel shamed to fight beside, but much of that skill had originated from O'Neill, and he still hesitated to strike a friend with full power in training. "And Carter still thinks I'm a kid."
"Colonel Carter is adept at believing the evidence of her own eyes." He wished to gently point out the truth of her perception without denying that there was more to it than that.
"And you're adept at believing the evidence of... other stuff." O'Neill flicked his eyebrows in challenge and assumed a fighting stance.
"Very well." Perhaps a brief demonstration would prove more effective than continued arguing.
Not that Teal'c truly believed this. But, after nearly three days aboard an Asgard vessel with no enemy to fight and no mission to complete, he would privately have to admit to being rel hal'toc.
Or, as the Tauri would put it, bored stupid.
It was an atypical session. At first, the young O'Neill's clumsiness was pronounced; he acquitted himself impressively for a part-grown boy faced with an opponent of Teal'c's stature, but dismally for a version of O'Neill. However, as their battle progressed, his reactions grew steadily faster, and whilst he was unable to gain an advantage, he parried and evaded Teal'c's attacks with ease.
This was interesting. Teal'c had long schooled himself in keeping his features blank to avoid signalling his next move. O'Neill knew his style as well as anyone bar Master Bra'tac, but still, such anticipation stretched the bounds of credibility.
Teal'c thought strongly of making a low sweeping kick, and instead took a long step backwards.
O'Neill leapt out of the way of the kick he had not made, and staggered as he landed, obviously bewildered by his own actions.
He was not the only one. "Kid... what the hell are you doing?" The older O'Neill had appeared in the doorway behind them, scowling and holding his head. It was unclear whether this was due to a continuing headache or a futile attempt to tame what the Asgard sleep pods had done to his hair.
His clone spun around, a sharp retort probably prepared, but as it happened, Teal'c had a comment of his own to make.
"I believe, O'Neill, he is reading my mind," he said calmly.
"Ah, Major." McKay regarded him from his hospital bed with baleful eyes. "Come to rescue me from my alleged rehabilitation at the hands of that maniacal Scottish scalpel-wielder? Or do you need me to rescue you? Have the primates taken over the science department yet? I'm expecting to hear reports of dung throwing and bottom-baring any day now."
"Actually... it's getting pretty close," John was forced to concede, sitting down heavily beside the bed. "I don't know how Doctor Weir handles all this," he said wearily.
"Oh, please." McKay rolled his eyes. "They're obviously testing you. Somebody, who's clearly had minimal exposure to your actual personality, has decided that your temporary custody of the city - which, incidentally, is by far the most rock-brained leadership decision Elizabeth has ever made; I can only assume it's down to the lack of my steadying influence - is their opportunity to lobby for some sort of wholly unjustified perks. They obviously don't realise that you'll have about as much influence with Elizabeth when she returns as Doctor Facinelli's goldfish."
He digested that stream of words carefully, in order to find the most pertinent aspect to comment on.
"Wait, Doctor Facinelli has a goldfish?"
McKay gave a one-shouldered shrug. "Actually it's more of a pinkfish. The xenoichthyologists liberated it from a lab on... that planet with the upside-down trees. They think it might be genetically engineered as a living water-purifier. So far they've discovered it eats paper, any kind of biological waste, and those little tiny screws that hold the arms on to a pair of glasses. Doctor Stansfield was not pleased. They only managed to dissuade him from trying to flush it down the toilet by pointing out that we don't know exactly what kind of scanning protocols the city has in place in the sewage treatment centre."
There was, John mused, a lot more going on in the city than just the parts of it he received reports on. As a rule, he only heard about those scientific enterprises that A, impacted the city's most vital systems, B, irritated McKay, or C, blew up. The science team showed impressive creativity in getting the most innocuous of projects into all three categories at once, but still, there was a lot more going on that flew beneath his radar.
Apparently, things did not fly beneath Doctor Weir's radar. Doctor Weir did not require a radar. Because every issue in Atlantis, big and small, came zooming straight toward her desk.
"You know Kavanagh's already filed three different complaints with me against other expedition members?"
"Oh. Forward those to me," McKay said, and then pouted. "Although, obviously, to receive those, I would need my laptop - you'll notice I say laptop, a type of computer that is particularly noted for being, oh, portable-"
"Wait, you want to receive Kavanagh's complaints?" John raised an incredulous eyebrow.
"Of course! There's a pool on. One more safety violation report about Simpson leaving her boots in the doorway, and there's chocolate in it for me."
Though the members of the Atlantis expedition were - at least technically - still getting paid, the city had rapidly developed the kind of barter economy that could only spring from several dozen genius minds with an unholy love for making graphs. John had been on bases before where ownership of a yo-yo could buy you things a thousand dollars couldn't out in the wider world, but this was the first one that had a calculated exchange rate between caffeine content and minutes of entertainment value.
"Do I get a ten percent agent's fee?" he checked. McKay narrowed his eyes.
"For bringing me my messages? What, are the trained monkeys on strike?"
"I think they're all sending me email," John said, leaning back in his chair.
"Ah, the monkeys and typewriters thought experiment." McKay's forehead wrinkled in a dissatisfied frown. "You know, whoever came up with that was woefully ignorant about statistics, not to mention the basics of primate behaviour. You can't even get a motivated office worker to work for half an hour without losing focus, how exactly are an infinite supply of monkeys meant to handle it? And how are we defining the complete works of Shakespeare? I mean, do the monkeys have to start over at every wrong keystroke, or are errors disregarded until the next correct character is registered? And, okay, even if we allow the - frankly flawed - initial premise that both monkeys and the time and space that contain them are genuinely infinite, what about other resources? All right, we'll charitably assume that the monkeys can be fed on scrap pages, and pretend that it's possible to have a hundred percent efficient recycling process, but that still doesn't address the issue of typewriter ribbons, whether the keys are immune to wear..."
John stretched out and put his feet up, and wondered if he should be worried at all that he'd come to regard the sound of McKay in full flow as a soothing break from the pressures of his day.
Daniel Jackson considered himself a patient man, but sooner or later, every man reached his limits. Unless that man was Teal'c.
Daniel lowered his book. Jack was still staring at him. He sighed internally and laid the book aside. "You're trying to read my mind, aren't you?"
Jack raised his eyebrows in as camp an expression of innocence as only a grey-haired USAF General who regularly blew the crap out of enemy installations could get away with.
"I think it's relatively unlikely that you'd be experiencing any telepathic effects yourself at this stage, sir," Sam chimed in, bless her. "Your clone didn't even seem to be aware what he was doing until Teal'c pointed it out."
"Assuming he was doing anything." Jack slid out of his inane mime act and into steely scepticism as smoothly as a car changing gear.
"Well, Jack, I'm pretty sure it's unusual to be jumping out of the way of moves your sparring partner hasn't made yet," Daniel pointed out.
"It's called anticipation!" Jack sounded the syllables out obnoxiously. "I've sparred with Teal'c a hundred times. I know how he fights."
"And I you, O'Neill," Teal'c rumbled. "I do not believe your clone's consistency in predicting my actions was within your normal abilities."
"So he was in the zone!" Jack shrugged. "He's young. His knees work better. He probably has better eyesight. No wonder he reacts faster."
"I keep saying you should get an eye test," Daniel said to him. "Don't think I didn't see you squinting at that paperwork last briefing."
Actually, he was more than a little suspicious that Jack had a pair of stealth reading glasses. It wasn't like Jack to neglect any aspect of physical fitness, but it was very like him to deny all signs of weakness until literally backed up against a wall. Which was possibly going to be Daniel's next move in his campaign to uncover the existence of said glasses, since even Teal'c had yet to have any success in sneaking up on him.
Motion sensors. It had to be motion sensors. Maybe if he could convince Doctor Lee to let SG-1 borrow that jamming device from P41-239...
"I squint at all your reports, Daniel," Jack said, making a little squishing motion with his hands. "It makes the paragraphs look smaller."
"Read my mind now, Jack," he suggested, and levelled a pointed stare. Jack just smirked.
Sam had long since learned to pick up the thread of her explanations around and through their interruptions. "It's unlikely that your own condition has progressed anywhere near as far as your clone's, sir," she said. "Jamie reported that he suffered a series of seizures, with lapses into the language of the Ancients; even accounting for the exacerbating effect of your contact with Jon, it's likely that there would be more obvious physical signs before your brain's structure is changed sufficiently to support abilities like telepathy."
"Exactly," Jack said, with that vacant smile that was meant to make you think he hadn't understood a word of it when you knew damn well that he did.
"So, no mind reading for you just yet, Jack," Daniel said lightly, and went back to his book.
Maybe this time he'd get as far as page four before Jack found a new way to distract him.
It wasn't difficult to find the kid. Jack just slipped himself into his 'oh crap, I have weird new alien powers' mindset - it was disturbingly easy to find - and let himself drift where his instincts took him.
'Wherever you go, there you are,' and all that.
They sat in silence a while, watching the starfield. The Asgard appeared to appreciate the importance of having windows to look out of when you were out among the stars. He knew there was a reason why he liked the little grey guys. Aside from that whole 'regularly saving his butt' thing.
Or in this case, his butts. Or their butts.
Aliens should definitely be banned from creating any further replicas of him, if only to cut down on the grammatical confusion.
He glanced sideways at his clone, at the same time as his clone glanced sideways at him.
"You're thinking almost totally in Ancient now," Jack observed mildly.
His clone shrugged. "I'm still speaking English," he countered.
"Because you're using my brain as a sounding board." He glowered.
"It's my brain too!" he said defensively, spreading his hands wide. "You're hardly using it. It's got fluff in the corners. What the hell do you do in that office all day?"
"Like high school mathematics is that much more demanding?"
Complicated equations stirred, unbidden, in the depths of his clone's mind. Jack only caught the edge of them, the shape without the substance, but it was haunting: like a word on the tip of the tongue, like déjâ vu. Things that he had once known, and would soon know again.
His clone's mind was undergoing a tectonic shift, and buried things were rising from deep beneath the surface.
But what the rest of SG-1 didn't realise was that Jack was right there in that changing landscape with him, already so inextricably linked that the Ancient knowledge locked in his own memory was struggling to break free. The link he'd been aware of between them for some days now was stretching like an elastic band as his clone's evolution raced on ahead of his own.
The further ahead he got, the faster Jack would begin to catch up.
He flicked his gaze sideways at his clone again. "You think Atlantis is the answer?"
In his clone's mind, images of a magnificent crystal city, rising out of the water. "I don't think." He raised a hand, and pointed to his head. "It thinks."
Jack understood.
"Major Sheppard." In the midst of a dispute between the biology department and the mess over whether it was or wasn't reasonable to store a one-eyed decomposing alien thing in the portable refrigeration unit, Grodin's voice over his radio was like an angelic choir descending from heaven. John almost concussed himself leaping to grab his earpiece.
"Sheppard here. Go!" he barked. He was more than prepared to heroically run to the rescue if somebody's swivel chair had developed a squeak.
Not that the Ancients ever made things like chairs that squeaked, damn them.
But as it turned out, Grodin had called him in for something considerably bigger.
"It appeared on our screens a short while ago," Grodin said. "At first we thought it was a glitch in the system. I called Doctor Zelenka down to take a look at it."
"It's not a glitch?" John presumed.
Zelenka looked up from the screen he was examining. "Two things. One, apparently we have long-range scanners. Two, our long-range scanners are picking up a ship."
"Wraith?" John was instantly alert. When his hands didn't find the weapon they were automatically reaching for, his mind stretched out instead. Atlantis was there as a soft pressure at the edge of his thoughts, like a puppy nudging its nose against his hand in the hope of being stroked. It didn't know exactly what he wanted, but it knew all kinds of neat tricks, yes it did, and would he like to see one? Would he, huh, huh, huh?
Zelenka shook his head minutely. "The scanners would recognise Wraith technology. This ship is of unknown manufacture, and approaching... very fast."
He didn't much like that pause. "How fast?" They would have to recall Weir from her trading mission - or, if it was going to get here that fast, maybe they should leave her on Iaerona. She would be pissed as hell to be cut out of the loop, but if that ship had hostile intentions...
"Actually," said Grodin, raising his head, "it's already here."
"There is a-" Zelenka began.
"Receiving a signal!" Grodin interrupted. His eyes widened as something more came through his earpiece. "Major, it's..."
The screen in front of them abruptly switched to video. John found himself confronted with a distinguished looking middle-aged black man... in a very familiar olive green uniform. The man smiled broadly.
"This is Lieutenant Colonel Casey of Stargate Command - hello, Atlantis base!"