“You can’t control the interface,” John said. “You can’t. It’s too strong. It’s not meant to be used like that. You have to slide into it and let it show you. It will do what you want, but you can’t make it. It’s like I was saying about skiing. Gravity is going to pull you down the hill. You can’t make it work some other way. You can just steer how you get there. That’s the skill.” He spread his hands out, flexing them to shake out tension. “You think he doesn’t let go?”
“I do not know him well,” Teyla said, “But he does not strike me as someone who can cease struggling. And if it is as you say, the more he fights the more it hurts. Carson wants to make it do things that are not quite the way it wants to, and so he finds it uncomfortable if not actually painful.”
John grinned sheepishly. “And I totally let the city top.”
She nudged him sideways, laughing. “It seems to work.”
He shoulder bumped her back. “Is that what it’s like to fly a Wraith ship?”
“Ummm,” she said, thinking. “Not exactly. A Wraith ship is designed for a queen. It desires mastery. It expects to serve you. No, not even that. It craves serving you. I do not know how to say it other than that it is designed to feel pleasure when it does what you wish. Otherwise it would not go into battle. It would not do things that will cause it pain, that might even cause it to be destroyed, unless the pleasure it got from serving you were so great that it overrode even self preservation.”
“Otherwise the minute you shot a Wraith ship it would get scared and run away,” John said. “Too bad it doesn’t work that way.”
“It does not,” Teyla said. “The reward of its queen’s or its commander’s approbation is so intense that it desires it even at the cost of great pain.” She flattened her hand against the floor of the platform. “Eternal would go into fire for me because it is well trained and it wishes to please me above all else.”
“Like a cavalry horse,” John said.
“What?”
“On Earth up until about a hundred years ago we used horses in war. They would charge straight into cannon fire sometimes, if they were trained to do it and their riders knew what they were doing. You could charge batteries that way, half a dozen guns firing grapeshot. And the horses would do it, if it was a good unit and they had that kind of rapport.” He looked around. “Is Eternal as bright as a horse?”
“About the same, I would guess?” Teyla replied. “I have never worked with horses. We did not use them on Athos, but I have seen them. Though I thought they were too small to carry a man on their back in a fight as you say.”
John nodded. “All the horses I’ve seen here are little. Thirteen, fourteen hands. I’m guessing here, but I think maybe when the Ancients brought people from Earth back to Pegasus ten thousand years ago and some of them brought their domestic animals, we didn’t have the bigger horses yet. I think they were bred later for height. In 8,000 BC it would have all been little horses. And maybe the Wraith here haven’t ever let a civilization reach the point where they could breed warhorses for size.” He put his head to the side thoughtfully. “That’s not true in the Milky Way. When I was at the SGC for six weeks a couple of years ago we visited this allied world that had been under the protection of the Asgard, and they had regular sized horses. But then presumably they were seeded from Earth in the Middle Ages, not ten thousand years ago.”
“That is truly fascinating,” she said. “There is so much work to be done, so many mysteries to solve. It will take lifetimes to even begin.”
“I hope we have lifetimes,” he said.
“I hope that we do too,” she said. “There is so much we might be, if we ever had the chance. If we could ever grow without knowing that as soon as we have reached a certain height we will be cut off. There is so much we could learn from you, and so much you could learn from us. So many marvels and so many amazing things, if we could but share.”
John looked at her sideways. “You don’t believe that we’ll contaminate you if we have too much contact?”
Teyla snorted. “John, for us that is nothing but a way for your people to feel justified in deserting us. To make it a virtue to leave us to die. How could those of us who have lost kin, who even now worry about their children, wish that you will go away and leave us to the Wraith? Do you think I wish that Torren did not have access to antibiotics or to surgery if he needed it? Since Sateda fell, we have not had anywhere we could trade for many medicines, and Athosians have died for the lack of them. ‘Let us not interfere’ is nothing but an excuse for turning your back on people in need, a way to make your selfishness a virtue.”
“Yeah, but sometimes ham-fisted help is worse than none at all,” he said. “A lot of bad things happen sometimes in the name of being well-meaning.”
“And so the answer is to do nothing at all?” Teyla challenged. “One must use judgment, in this as in all things. But is it rational to say one doctor is bad, let us have no more doctors?” She shook her head. “One must care, John, if one is worthy of being called human. That was a thing I knew of you the first day.”
“Huh?”
Teyla tilted her head back, looking up at the ceiling of the cruiser. “You had come among us for a day only, and then there were the Wraith. They had culled our people, destroyed our camp, and even then a second wave came down upon us to seek retribution for the Dart that was destroyed. And what did you do? You did not speak of contamination, or of the importance of allowing our culture to develop on its own. You took them all to Atlantis, Jinto and Charin, Kanaan and all the rest. You took them through the gate to your camp, and you shared your food with them. You were beleaguered yourselves, in fear of the shield failing, cut off from your home. And yet you shared with us all you had. Your limited supplies, your fading power. And then you came for the captives.”
Teyla leaned back against the step. “I expected to die. How not? We were culled. We were the Lost. A few minutes might pass or a few days until we were fed upon. When the Wraith took Colonel Sumner, I knew I would be next.” She shook her head, half leaned against his shoulder. “The last thing I expected was to see you and Lt. Ford sneaking in. You must understand that no one is rescued. No one returns. I stood with my age-mate Halling and knew we would die together. And then you came. Why should I think it would be better if you had not interfered?”
“We woke the Wraith,” John said. “It might have been a lot better if we hadn’t. A lot of people might be alive today if we hadn’t.”
“John, we have been dying for centuries. For thousands of years. You have seen what the Wraith did on Sateda, six years before you came. Once they did the same to Emege and the cities of Athos. That is not something you began.” She shook her head. “It is a conceit to believe our story begins with you, or that before you came we dwelled in an innocent paradise. The myth of your culpability is just one more way of making the story about you.”
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
“Do not be,” she said, leaning against his shoulder. “We know no more of you than you do of us, and is it not human nature to fit those you meet into your story? To find a frame that allows you to reach for understanding? You tell your stories and I tell mine. And both are true, and both are false.”
“That makes a weird kind of sense,” he said. John looked at her sideways. “I don’t know what to do except follow my gut. You know. Do what I think’s right. I never claimed to understand it.” He squeezed her hand, long green claws between his fingers. “I’m not like Carter or McKay. I wasn’t some kid genius who always figured they’d have the weight of the universe on their shoulders. I’m not like Elizabeth, who knew she had what it took to make decisions that affected millions of people. I don’t know what to do with that kind of power.”