Daniel knew that what he'd said the night before had distracted Jack from whatever personal Hell he'd woken up to, but doing so came with a price. It not only forced Daniel to face those memories he'd been trying to not only ignore but actively forget, but Jack was sure to want to become involved, a reality Daniel found both relieving and horrifying.

Fortunately, he didn't have the time to worry about that right now. The howlers had been up with the dawn, and insured that SG-1 also were. They'd cut Daniel and Sam away from the rest of the team, and herded them out into the jungle. At first it was unclear where they were going, but gradually Daniel began to recognize the terrain, and he realized they were being taken back to the stones.

The howlers had understood that Daniel needed more of the unusual writing in order to translate it. He still wasn't sure what good that would do the monkeys, since they couldn't speak his language nor he theirs, so translating the words so that he could understand them didn't seem all that helpful to the apes. It was almost as if... as if they already knew what was written, but they wanted him to find out. It seemed like an awful lot of work to go to in order to make some strange off-worlders read the local signage. It seemed like there had to be something more than that, something Daniel was missing.

"So where are you on the translations?" Sam asked.

"Pretty much exactly where I was-" he checked his watch, "-an hour ago. I can recognize the individual symbols, but the sentences don't make any sense. See this line here?" he gestured towards one of the stones, "That reads 'the man is indigent'... or possibly 'indecent'. But that doesn't make any sense given the context. Most of what we've got on the device is technical, specs and instructions."

"We think," Sam pointed out, reminding Daniel that they'd been unable to made much headway with the device by itself either.

He forged on, "This sentence doesn't make any sense taken in context with everything else. It also doesn't seem to apply to this device in any meaningful way, unless it somehow sucks your clothes off when activated, which is hardly in keeping with Goa'uld technology."

"I suppose that would be one way to catch your enemies off-guard. Nobody would be expecting that," Sam said, "Though pantsing seems a little bit juvenile."

"A little bit," Daniel agreed.

He knew Sam was annoyed. Not with him, but with the fact that she really couldn't help him all that much. Because he'd brought her in on the device, the howlers seemed to think she was his assistant now or something. But there wasn't much for her to do, aside from try to look busy so they wouldn't get pissed off with her.

The scarred howler and the ginger one were evidently following other pursuits, as they hadn't shown up today. But a half dozen black howlers had herded them out here, and now hung from the tree branches, watching them carefully. Neither Sam nor Daniel needed a refresher course on how fast and strong these monkeys were, and they had decided not to try making any trouble for the moment.

The both of them had kind of been hoping this would be one of those times General Hammond would decide to throw the protocol manual out the window, and come looking for them with UAVs or maybe even another team. But if he had, that was probably long over and the camp of the monkeys was too far away. SG-1 was a team with undeniably incredible luck, but an unsung part of that were the almost flawless instincts General Hammond had for what the team was doing, where they were and what had happened to them. It sometimes seemed to Daniel like General Hammond had known them all much longer than they had known him, and of course -in a way- he actually had.

Daniel straightened and stretched, noticing the muscles in his back had numerous complaints he'd been ignoring for several hours, primarily having to do with the way he'd been hunched over studying the markings on the various stones. Sam handed him their shared water canteen, and he drank from it, then passed it back. The howlers had been smart enough to realize that Daniel and Sam would need water while they were out here, and had fetched a second canteen, which had been given to them after they were driven out of the enclosure. If only the monkeys could do something about the bugs beyond the protective walls of the enclosure. Both Daniel and Sam were getting pretty badly chewed up.

Daniel had also briefly tried to communicate that he needed his antihistamines, but that was too far a leap communication-wise. Maybe he could've gotten there with the small ginger howler, who seemed to be better at charades than the rest of the monkeys, but that she wasn't around today.

"There's got to be something I'm missing," Daniel murmured, wandering from one stone to the next, looking for something, some sort of inspiration that would make this all make sense.

But he was two nights without much sleep, he had a headache, and was continually clearing his throat just so he could breathe, sometimes stopping to sneeze and cough. His brain was foggy, he could barely see without his glasses, and he was beginning to think he was just spinning his wheels, getting nowhere fast because the howlers had such a dogged preoccupation with this device that they were barely willing to even briefly entertain any attempt at communication that wasn't obviously related to it.

Daniel had had a breakthrough with the one howler yesterday, and that one hadn't shown up today. He and Jack had finally put a dent in Scar's thick-headedness, and suddenly he wasn't around either, and they were being split up again. It was like the howlers didn't even understand how progress had been made, or like they didn't want progress to be made at all. But that being the case, they were working awfully hard to try and get something out of Daniel. He just didn't understand, and he was getting to be too tired to try to figure it out.

Patiently, Sam sat and watched him.

The two of them had gotten on well immediately, in fact Daniel couldn't remember anyone else he'd so immediately made such a positive connection with. Sam's expertise was astrophysics, Daniel's was archeology, and normally the two fields would never have crossed over. But thanks to the Stargate Program, they had a lot in common, and were frequently working closely, especially when their secondary skills came into play, Sam's being engineering and Daniel's linguistics. It was amazing how often on missions all of their skills were needed and worked in tandem. Under any other circumstances, Daniel and Sam would probably have found it impossible to really relate to one another. But the Stargate had a way of bridging gaps and bringing disparate personalities together for a common goal. Of course, it didn't hurt any that Sam was one of the nicest, sweetest, most compassionate people Daniel had ever met, all this in addition to her brilliance and toughness as a scientist and member of the Air Force.

At first, their immediate and overt friendliness towards one another had seemed to disturb Jack. Daniel had been the first to figure out that Jack and Sam had an attraction going on, that they were both in vehement denial of, but he'd known better than to say anything. He'd also eventually realized it was deeper than that. Jack didn't make friends easily, and he guarded them jealously. He'd never admit it, but the colonel had been afraid he might lose Daniel to Sam. But what had actually happened was that all four members of SG-1 had built a team based not only on trust and respect, but deepest affection for one another. They were family. Daniel realized that Jack had been the first to actually realize how close they all were to one another, probably because he had the most experience in team bonding.

Certainly it had taken Daniel quite awhile to accept that the rest of the team cared about him just as much as he cared about them. He wasn't used to people looking out for him, and it had at first rattled and even scared him. The reality was that Daniel didn't make friends any more easily than Jack. Rather, he tended to meet people who knew they could use him, and liked him for that reason. He had trouble believing that he could have value to people beyond his skills. It had frightened him at first. Frightened him because he was scared to believe it, and even more scared it might go away.

But the things he'd been through, seen and done with SG-1 had made him confident they'd always have his back, as he would have theirs. And that in turn made him feel confident even now, under these conditions, that they'd be alright. SG-1 could handle some monkeys. They just needed to figure out... how they were going to do that. So far, Daniel had come up empty.

"What if we're going about this all wrong?" Daniel wondered aloud, mainly to himself.

Sam had been watching him in silence for hours. She'd only spoken to him when he'd stopped or appeared ready to take a break, otherwise she had not interrupted. But Daniel had become so deeply absorbed in what he was doing that the thought of taking a break hadn't occurred to him in some while.

"What do you mean?" Sam asked.

"What if," Daniel paused to climb over a nearly crumbled stone to reach where Sam had been sitting and waiting, then resumed, "What if they're not after a translation? What would they do with a translation if they got one?" he waved in the general direction of a couple of howlers that had seemed on the verge of falling asleep but were now eying him suspiciously, "They don't speak English. What good would it do them? What's the point?"

"Okay," Sam said, "I'm with you. So what do they want?"

Elated by the admission, Daniel answered, "I have no idea."

Years of working with ancient history had taught Daniel that not knowing what you were looking for, or not understanding what something meant was often a sign that you were closer to the answers than ever before. The less he thought he knew, the more excited he became. It was those pieces that didn't fit which had always interested him, the not knowing, the compelling nature of mysteries in the past. He'd been accused of saying the pyramids were built by little green men, but the reality was that -prior to going through the Stargate- all he'd been saying was that the pyramids were much older than commonly believed, and that unlocked a veritable treasure trove of questions, showing things commonly held up as facts for the almost baseless speculations they really were. Not knowing was the greatest thing that could ever happen in Daniel's line of work, but almost nobody seemed to realize it, always eager to have all the answers before they uncovered enough evidence to even ask the right questions.

A bemused look came into Sam's eyes.

She was one of the few, the magnificent and brilliant few, who knew that not knowing was the beginning of the greatest adventure when it came to unlocking the secrets of the universe. Daniel had come at the Stargate from an archeological point of view, Sam from the view of an astrophysicist, but they had both come to the same conclusion: the people who'd been studying the Stargate before them had been too biased, too set in their ways, too certain of their facts. The Stargate was the gateway not just to other planets, but other ways of thinking, mysteries of the universe that those logical minds who had failed to open the door to other worlds would have thought were beyond the realm of human comprehension.

But Sam also knew their situation was a dire one, and this was not the ideal time to be starting over from scratch. Especially since doing so might just tick off their captors. She knew that it was easy to lose sight of reality after entering the wonderland of discovery. She also knew only too well how deeply involved Daniel became with his work. Daniel would not only forget about sleeping and eating, he would continue working even if the world was literally falling to pieces around him. That determination was one of his most valuable assets, but it was also one of his greatest weaknesses, one that SG-1 and Jack in particular had saved him from more than once.

Absently, Daniel held his injured arm with his good hand, thinking. The bite wound was throbbing a bit, as was the part of his head where the howler had struck him, which wasn't exactly a surprise. The pain was a minor distraction, for his mind was racing along this new course, coming up with alternative theories and discarding them almost as quickly. He was only vaguely aware of the fact that Sam was watching him with obvious concern, wondering what he was thinking.

Daniel started to pace, an unconscious reflection of what was going on in his mind as he followed one thought trail, realized it was the wrong one, backtracked and headed down another. It hadn't been until he'd joined SG-1 that he'd started really having to build up physically, at which time he'd found a notable connection between exercise and the clearing of thoughts. He'd always paced when he was forming ideas and then trying to explain them, but he'd never thought about why that was. Not until he'd started having most of his breakthroughs in the gym at the SGC. Now whenever he was stalled out, he found some way to move around.

Suddenly he stopped, and turned to Sam, "It's the device they're interested in."

"We knew that already," Sam pointed out.

"But did we understand why?" Daniel fired back.

"Why?" Sam asked, her brow furrowing.

"I assumed maybe they wanted us to explain how the device worked, or maybe to understand how it worked before we walked off with it. But what if there's another reason?"

"Like what?" Sam evidently wasn't following Daniel on this one.

"What if they want us to use it?"

He could see his own fear reflected in her eyes. That fear was of the unknown. Not knowing what the device actually did, they couldn't know what it might mean if the howlers actually wanted them to use it. SG-1 hadn't exactly built a great track record from messing around with devices they didn't understand. It wasn't even as simple as playing with fire, since you could not only wind up burned or dead, you could wind up with an alien consciousness, you could end up body swapped, you could get sent to an alternate reality... any number of bad things could happen.

"Maybe we're taking the wrong lead," Daniel further suggested.

Sam didn't answer that, merely looked worried about what he would say.

For Daniel, there was only one way he could figure out what the device did, and that was figuring out this written language. But for Sam, there might be another way.

"Maybe we should take a closer look at the inside of that device."

Sam looked like that was exactly what she'd been afraid he would say.

Daniel had done as much as he could to help Sam, doing his best with his feeble understanding of this melded language to be sure that any panel she wanted to remove to get to the interior of the device wasn't marked with the equivalent of "DANGER: risk of electrocution" before she pulled it off.

Beneath those panels was a layout of tech that looked faintly familiar to Daniel. He'd never been much of a tech guy, but three years fighting the Goa'uld (not counting Ra) had taught him to recognize the colored crystals that seemed to be the basis for the majority of Goa'uld tech. Of course, even without that, he could have guessed the device was of Goa'uld origin, simply because over a third of the symbols etched on it were from a very old Goa'uld dialect.

The percentage bothered him. On the stones, the three root languages had all merged equally and seamlessly. On the device, Goa'uld dominated, to such a degree that he could actually pick out some words. And something else caught his attention now he was looking for warning labels.

What caught his eye as looking like warnings or caution labels were written slightly larger, bolder, and almost entirely in Goa'uld, except for certain portions that had been carefully scratched out and written over. He hadn't noticed the scratching before. The melded language was... it was almost like it had been scrawled into the margins at a later date than the original labels, none of which explained what the device did, what it was for or how it worked; evidently assuming that anyone holding it would already know that. He was guessing the extra writing in the margins might not be assuming the same thing.

After that, he'd gone back to the stones, but found he wasn't able to concentrate. The panels on the device were nagging at him. There was something there, he was sure of it. Sam had become so engrossed in examining the device's interior that she didn't notice when Daniel took the outside panels and laid them out side by side in the dirt, then stood back to stare at them, frowning.

The monkeys noticed, and chattered a bit, probably because Sam and Daniel had been brought out here to look at the stones, the device they could have looked at back at the camp. But Daniel didn't notice the monkeys and after chattering at each other for a bit, they settled back down. Perhaps they figured their job was just to bring their captives here and make sure they didn't run off, and anything else was outside their job description. Or maybe they realized Daniel was onto something.

That was all well and good, if Daniel could figure out what it was.

"Daniel!" the sound of Sam's voice drew him out of his concentration.

He looked around, blinking, having half-forgotten where he was. Sam was of course right where he'd left her, kneeling beside the cylinder. She waved him over. Reluctantly, he left the panels he'd been staring at, and came to sit beside her and look at the device.

"Do you know what this looks like to me?" Sam asked.

Daniel thought for a moment, then shook his head.

"You remember the device Ma'chello invented for body swapping?" Sam asked.

Involuntarily, Daniel recoiled a bit from the cylinder. He most certainly did remember that. The thought that this was anything like it filled him with an unexpected horror. Switching bodies hadn't been his idea of a good time, even if he'd spent most of it in a coma.

"I don't think it's the same device," Sam said hurriedly, well aware of what Daniel had gone through, "But I think it -or something like it- may have provided the inspiration for that device. Certain parts of it look very similar to what Ma'chello invented."

"Okay," Daniel said, making himself relax a bit, "So what's it for?"

"I'm not sure," Sam answered with an unhappy look, "But we also know the Goa'uld have experimented with genetics more than once, and I think this device may have been a tool they used to do that."

"What kind of genetic experiments?" Daniel asked, his revulsion and curiosity now waging war, with no certain outcome as to which would win.

Both he and Sam could of course list examples they'd found, of devices, of people and in literature. They were intimately aware of the Goa'uld's desire for a 'perfect' host, and much of what that implied. But that didn't necessarily explain what exactly this particular device was for.

Sam shook her head, "I'm not sure," then she looked up and nodded towards the monkeys, "But I think maybe they know... or want to know. I think you're right; this is what they wanted us to figure out."

"What makes you say that?" Daniel wanted to know.

"Daniel... I'm not sure those monkeys... are monkeys."

Daniel understood at once what Sam was implying, but some part of his brain rejected it as impossible, and he sat there blinking at her in silence for a bit while he tried to keep a grip on his normally open mind, which was struggling to be closed to this concept, citing it as ludicrous and -in layman's terms- nuts. Sam gazed at him steadily, and it seemed like she was actually hoping Daniel would find some way to reject her theory. It was a horrible thought, and neither of them wanted to accept the possibility, even though they had both surely seen enough in their time to realize it wasn't as unlikely as they would have preferred to believe.

"Oh," Daniel said finally, because there didn't seem to be any other words in his admittedly massive vocabulary that could be used in this instance.

"Yeah," Sam replied, apparently unable to think of any suitable words herself.

Sickening as it was, Sam's theory actually did help. With this potential context in mind, Daniel began to gain traction in his translation work. Since he now had some idea as to what the writing might be describing, he was able to make educated guesses about what certain words were, or what the sentences might be implying. It looked like whatever was written on the stones was connected, possibly a historical record of the device's construction and initial use.

He wasn't far enough along to be sure, and he didn't have the tools he would normally, so he couldn't make notes or scribble down theories, instead having to keep it all in his head, just as Sam was doing from her scientific angle, making the work a lot harder for both of them. But in a way, despite the danger and the grim nature of what they were studying, they were both having a great time. This was exactly the kind of challenge they had signed on for, aside from the obvious saving the world mission.

Deeply absorbed in their work, neither of them was aware any longer of being bitten by mosquitoes, they had no concept of where the sun was in the sky, they forgot to stop regularly to drink water and didn't even notice that their stomachs were empty and complaining. Daniel was no longer cognizant of his headache or the fact that he periodically went into a sneezing fit; these distractions were so minor as to not even be noticeable now he was making progress on his work.

Eventually, as it started to get dark, the howlers became agitated, and then finally started pushing them back in the direction of the camp. Sam managed to pick up the device as she was herded away, but the howlers at the rear of the procession picked up the panels from it before scurrying up into the trees. Like true monkeys, they seemed to prefer being off the ground whenever possible, but were willing to make allowances for the fact that neither Sam nor Daniel could travel that way.

As few howlers as they deemed necessary stayed on the ground to prod the captives in the right direction, and they regularly cycled off, a pair coming down from the trees, then a pair formerly on ground duty climbing up the trees and disappearing into their branches. Outside the camp, the howlers seemed to find being on the ground rather like being on point. It occurred to Daniel only now to wonder what it was they were afraid of, because he didn't think it was him or Sam.

Whatever was out there in the jungle, if it was powerful enough to take on the howler troop, surely it was a threat to any humans wandering around as well. Sam might have had the same thought, in any case the two of them kept quiet and alert on the way back.

Back at the camp, there were hoots and howls of greeting from the monkeys that hadn't gone out today, and responses from the returning monkeys who'd been on guard duty. It seemed more than just a casual greeting though. It seemed to Daniel that they were conveying complex ideas. Maybe it was just his new-found bias with the thought that their ancestors might once have been human, but it felt like conversations were intense, varied and meaningful and he could almost grasp what they were saying, though of course he would never be able to repeat it.

Prior to the 1960's, there had been attempts to teach apes to speak, including attempting to raise them as if they were human children. Most of these experiments not only failed, they ended in tragedy. There was a general consensus among scientists of the time that apes were not capable of learning language, and that was why they could not speak. But some more open minded souls took it upon themselves to prove that theory false. They contended that the reason apes didn't speak was because they were literally physically incapable of it. So instead they had taught their apes sign language, and met with success that rocked the world of science, and in particular psychology. Heretofore, speech had been unique to humans, with lesser beast deemed lesser because of what they could not do. Signing apes and parrots learning to use labels changed everything that scientists thought they knew about the animal world; and they hadn't liked it a bit.

But even if these apes used a sign language, Daniel hadn't been able to pick up on its nuances yet, and he would be unable to make the same vocalizations as the howlers for the same reason they could not mimic him. The design of their vocal apparatus was simply too different. Parrots also had a completely different design from humans, so they could not learn to speak by example but instead had to listen to the sounds humans made and manipulate their voice box until they got it right; but the vocal systems of a parrot were wonderfully complex, and nobody quite understood how they worked. Humans and apes were far more limited in the range of sounds they could produce, and there was little overlap.

So far there had been little evidence that the howlers wanted to learn to communicate with SG-1. All their moves so far had been for SG-1 to learn to communicate with them. But, by the laws of biology, even if Daniel could learn to understand the language of the howlers, he would not be able to speak it; no matter how smart he was or how hard he might try, he would be functionally unable to communicate with them using their language. The task was impossible.