The sun was rising over the palace compound but there were no sounds from the temple, none of the familiar ritual of the morning. Instead, there were Jaffa on guard at the entrance to the pyramid, and more Jaffa marching purposefully toward the courtyard gate. Teal’c craned his head, but couldn’t see which way they turned. Not toward the house, he thought, and hoped it was true.
“Teal’c?”
It was Egeria who spoke from the doorway of the bedroom, and he turned, dipping his head.
“Look at this,” she said. She held out a palm device, the finger-stalls dangling. “It seems Ra trusts us this far.”
Teal’c stared for a moment, embarrassingly glad she had not put it on before she told him. If he had been faced with the device, the gold disk nestled in her palm, the glittering fingers — his reaction would have shamed them all. “Indeed.”
“It was in the basket with the queen’s dress,” Egeria said. “We didn’t see it last night.”
“You must put it on,” Teal’c said, though his throat tightened at the wrongness of the idea. “Ra will expect to see you wearing it.”
She nodded, and worked her fingers into the pieces. She had a little trouble with the fastenings, and after a moment Teal’c moved to help her, tugging the last closure into place.
“Your fingers are cold,” Aset said.
“It’s early still,” he answered, but he guessed she knew that was not the entire cause.
Aset looked away, moving her fingers carefully in the device’s embrace. “We — this is new to both of us,” she said. “Egeria knows how it should work, but she’s never used one.”
Teal’c took a deep breath. This was Aset, Aset and Egeria together, and unless he ceased to believe in them, he would have to trust that they would use even Goa’uld tools for good. “I hope it will not come to that,” he said. “We cannot fight Ra directly.”
“No.” This time it was Egeria who spoke. “But I can’t say I’m sorry to have a weapon of my own.”
That was a sentiment Teal’c could share, and he nodded, his hand tightening on his staff weapon. “Yes —”
The door was abruptly flung open, and he swung to face it, bringing his weapon to bear. Half a dozen of Ra’s Jaffa stood there, their captain to the fore.
“What is the meaning of this?” Egeria drew herself up, the beads in her hair clashing. “How dare you interrupt me?”
“Your pardon, Lady,” the captain said. “Ra requires your presence. Immediately.”
Egeria lifted her chin. “We will come. And I am sure Ra will be less than pleased by your discourtesy.”
Teal’c took a tighter grip on his staff weapon and placed himself at Egeria’s shoulder. To his relief, the other Jaffa said nothing about their weapons, but hurried them toward the throne room.
Egeria checked in the doorway, and Teal’c’s breath caught in his throat. A body lay sprawled before the throne, a palace servant in fine linen now scorched and bloodied, and beyond it stood the young queen, her children clutched against her skirts. Ra glared at her from the throne, then waved to the nearest Jaffa. The Jaffa shoved the queen to her knees, settling the baby wailing. She clutched him more tightly, but said nothing.
“How dare you defy me?” Ra demanded. “How dare you stand against your god?”
The queen said nothing, holding the wailing baby tight against her breasts. The older boy buried his face against her shoulder, too afraid to cry.
“You see what this has earned him,” Ra went on, pointing to the body. “A deserved death, and the end of all chance of rebirth. His body will be given to the jackals, and scattered into so many pieces that even the gods themselves could not find and restore him. Tell me why the same should not be done to you!”
“Gracious Lord,” Egeria said. Teal’c could see the tension in her shoulders, prayed Ra was too distracted to notice. “What has happened for you to summon us in such haste?”
“This woman conspires against me,” Ra answered. “She and this slave would have sent word to my enemies.” He turned back to the queen. “And I would have honored you for your beauty, raised you up among my servants, had you but proven worthy.” He gestured to the Jaffa. “Still, perhaps she will serve someone as a host. Take her to the ship.”
Teal’c stiffened, and made himself relax again, hoping none of the other Jaffa had noticed. It would be almost impossible to rescue the queen from the cells on the mothership — Ra wouldn’t be taken by surprise a second time.
“Gracious Lord,” Egeria said again. “If I might offer a suggestion?”
Ra lifted an eyebrow.
“Perhaps she could be of more use to you here,” Egeria said. “If she remains in the palace, the rebels will try to rescue her because she is their queen. It will be an excellent opportunity to crush them utterly.”
There was a moment of silence, and then Ra smiled slowly. “I was correct, Egeria, I shall certainly enjoy getting to know you better. Jaffa! Return the woman to her cell, and the children with her. Then double the guard — but discreetly.”
The leader of the Jaffa bowed his head. “At once, Lord.” At his gesture, two more Jaffa hauled the queen to her feet and turned her toward the door.
“And you, Egeria,” Ra continued. “You will join me.”
Egeria dipped her head. “I am honored —”
“Your pardon, Lord.” That was Ra’s First Prime, standing impassive in the doorway. “There is a message from our scouts.”
Ra waved his hand. “Later.”
“Forgive me, Lord,” the First Prime said. “I fear the matter is urgent.”
For a moment, Teal’c thought the System Lord was going to lose his temper, but then Ra sighed. “We must postpone our discussion, then, Egeria. Nean’tac, I trust this will merit my attention —”
He swept out, still talking, the Jaffa coming to attention around him, and Egeria drew herself up. “Jaffa! I wish escort to my quarters, a decent meal — and has anyone found my servants?”
“At once, Lady,” a Jaffa said, bowing, and the senior officer remaining shook his head.
“No, Lady, there has been no sign of them.”
“Then I will require staff from among the humans here,” she said firmly. “See to it. Come, Teal’c.”
He bowed, impassive, and followed her from the throne room. At the door of the queen’s quarters, she dismissed the escort, and stalked into the bedroom without a backward glance. Teal’c remained in the outer room long enough to be sure no one lingered, then came to join her. Egeria was huddled on the bed, her head in her hands, and when she looked up there were tears on her cheeks, leaving tracks of kohl on her skin.
“I don’t know if I’ve made things better or worse,” Aset said. “What if I’ve only made it harder for Jack and the others?”
Teal’c wrapped his arms around her. She was trembling with reaction, and he tightened his hold, kissed her hair. “It would have been worse to let Ra take them to the mothership,” he said. “And we will find a way to warn O’Neill.”
“We must,” Egeria said. “Or they will be walking into a trap I have set for them.”
Sam woke at mid afternoon with the muzzy feeling of someone who had been up all night and then slept during the day, her breasts aching with the need to nurse. The whole house was sleeping, visitors sprawled on mats and curled up in corners wherever they could, the best bedroom given over to Pharaoh and his mother, who had presumably taken the opportunity to nap while they could. But Ellie…Ellie wouldn’t be asleep at this time of day.
She wasn’t. The other Teal’c, the Teal’c from the future that wasn’t hers, was playing with her in the courtyard, one eye always on the road. A shadow moved in the entrance to the gatehouse, Colonel Carter keeping watch in the shade, her camo uniform blending with the colors of the mud brick.
“Here is your mother,” Teal’c said to the baby quietly. He looked up at Sam and she could swear she saw his mouth quirk in a smile. “I believe she is growing hungry.”
“Well,” Sam said scooping her up. “Some bread and some me. Thank you for watching her.”
“I do not mind,” Teal’c said. He put his large hand on the baby’s head for a moment as he released her. “I like children.”
“Do you have children…” Sam began and stopped, worried that she was stepping on a sore subject.
“I have a son named Ry’ac,” Teal’c said, and this time he actually did smile. “He has grown into a fine young man and has recently married.”
“Oh.” Sam hauled Ellie up on her shoulder as Ellie flailed around with pudgy bare feet. “That’s wonderful.”
Teal’c nodded. “Perhaps he has grown well despite my choices rather than because of them, but I am very proud of him.”
“Isn’t that the way it works?” Sam sat down. Ellie wanted to nurse now, and she was going to flail until she did. The next thing would be a piercing scream, and it seemed cruel to wake everybody up, as tired as they all were.
“Perhaps,” Teal’c said. He glanced down at Ellie with a smile, not looking away from her as most of the rest of his team did, like they’d never heard of breastfeeding before. Maybe the Jaffa were a little more sensible about these things than people from her own culture had been.
Sam settled Ellie on the left, brushing an errant strand of brown hair back from her face, soft and fine against her baby cheek. A thought occurred to her. “Daniel said that the other me knew my father.”
“That is correct.” Teal’c nodded slowly. “As did I. General Jacob Carter was a fine man. It was an honor to know him. I owed him my life.”
“Oh.” Sam looked over at him, then away. “I didn’t. He died in December 1969, before I was two years old.” Teal’c didn’t say anything, so she went on. “He was killed in action over Vietnam. His plane was shot down and he tried to bail out, but his parachute didn’t open.” Sam had told this story so many times that her voice was even, and after all she didn’t remember any of it. “His wingman, George Hammond, tracked where he fell and his body was recovered. I think he blamed himself somehow.”
Teal’c nodded again, his eyes rising to the endless azure sky. “George Hammond. Lieutenant George Hammond.”
“Yes.”
“We met him,” Teal’c said. “A few months before that time. It must have been shortly before he was sent to battle.”
“How…”
“It is a very long story involving temporal physics.” The corner of Teal’c’s mouth twitched. “If you would like a technical explanation you had better ask Colonel Carter. But the result was that we were transported into the past, to the summer of 1969, and there you gave Lieutenant George Hammond a note from his future self, asking him to help us return to our own time. Which he did.”
“Oh.” Sam felt a frisson down her spine, the touch of the fascinating and marvelous. “Time travel.”
“Indeed. I did not consider greatly at the time that you were, of course, already there.”
Sam nodded. “In the summer of 1969 I was learning to walk. We were at Pope Air Force base in North Carolina. My dad got sent to Vietnam in the fall. It was his second tour.”
“General Jacob Carter said that his life was saved by George Hammond, and in that battle he won the Distinguished Flying Cross and then returned home to his wife and daughter. Your brother, Mark, was born two years later.”
Sam blinked. The pieces fit together, beautifully and perfectly as they always did once you understood. “You changed it,” she said. “That’s why I’m so different from your me. She changed it when she gave George Hammond the note from himself. He knew he couldn’t be killed in Vietnam because he was going to live to be an old man and send the note! He couldn’t be killed! So he took risks that he otherwise wouldn’t have, and one of them saved my father’s life.” She met Teal’c’s eyes. “George Hammond was always guilty. He always said to my mother that he felt responsible for my father’s death because he should have done something heroic and insanely brave to prevent it. And in your world he did.”
“In my world he did,” Teal’c said gravely. “George Hammond and Jacob Carter were lifelong friends. He died nearly four years ago after his symbiote, Selmak, died.”
“Symbiote?”
“Your father chose to become a Tok’ra host like Aset,” Teal’c said. “He had contracted a fatal disease. I believe you called it lymphoma. Selmak’s host was dying of old age, and Selmak offered to become one with your father and save his life if your father would share that life with him.”
“Cancer,” Sam said. “An incurable cancer?”
“He chose to become the host of the Tok’ra Selmak who healed him of the disease. Together they were a powerful force in the war against the Goa’uld.” Teal’c leaned back against the wall. “He himself rescued me and General O’Neill in a ha’tak when our glider malfunctioned and left us adrift in space.”
“My father flew a space ship.” Sam shook her head. She could still see the color picture that had been beside her mother’s bed, that young man a decade younger than she was now, stiff and formal in his uniform, posed in front of the flag like everybody else. She’d looked at it a million times, wondered what he would say if he could talk, wondered what he would have wanted. Wondered what it would have been like to know him. Well, now she knew that.
“He flew it exceedingly well,” Teal’c said.
She shook her head. “And so that’s the right future? That’s the good future and I’m some kind of mistake?”
“I do not believe so,” Teal’c said. His eyes rested on Ellie. “I do not believe that either of you are a mistake. You are different, products of different lives and different experiences, and hence you have made different choices. But I do not believe that either of you are wrong or have failed.” He leaned back against the wall, stretching his long legs out before him. “Perhaps you wonder if you should be her. And yet she wonders if she should be you.”
Sam blinked. “Why?”
“You have what she does not, just as she has what you do not. And you are as valued here — king’s architect, builder of a new world — as she is in her place. It is no little thing, what you do, and you do not seem unhappy.”
“I’m not,” Sam said. “Actually, I’m really happy. I like my work and I like my family and…”
“And you would not return to the future if you could?”
Sam shifted Ellie, switching her to the other side. That was the operative question, and they hadn’t had time to talk about it. “No,” she said quietly. “I don’t think so.”
Teal’c nodded again. “Then it is as it is. Perhaps given all the worlds there may be, each of us plays all parts somewhere. I do not know.”
“Neither do I,” she said. “But you have to start somewhere.”
Jack stuck his head out the door. “Sam? We need you for a minute for a logistics thing. Hor-Aha wants you.”
“Coming,” Sam said, getting to her feet, and Teal’c smiled.
“As I said,” he said.