“And yet they are the best ones,” Teyla said quietly, her eyes on the falling snow outside. “Who would want to entrust the lives of people to someone to whom they were nothing? I would not follow such a leader. Nor would I give responsibility to someone who did not feel the full weight of it.”
“There’s the bind,” Eva said. “Empathy and flexibility are important in a leader. And yet it’s those very qualities that mean that events cut them to pieces.” She reached for her cold coffee. Cold was better than none. “So they’ve got to have something firm to stand on. They need good skills and a supportive network to get through it. With the right kind of platform to stand on, people can thrive in the most difficult situations.” Her eyes met Teyla’s. “But you know that,” she said. “Coming from a world where everyone lives under that kind of shadow.”
“Yes,” Teyla said thoughtfully, “And no. Because there is no responsibility. The Wraith come, inevitable as weather, but also equally without fault. No one is to blame. Tragedy strikes, but no one is expected to do anything about it. It is no one’s fault.” She shook her head. “I am dreaming about old stories,” she said. “I never liked the story of the changeling girl, never, not even as a child.” She gave Eva a rueful smile, strange in a Wraith queen’s face. “I felt sorry for her. A girl who was transformed into a monster, into a revenant, but who even the Ancestors could not catch, because she could shift her shape into that of a white bird. And so she haunts the forests still, disguised as a patch of mist or as a water bird, waiting for the unwary.” Teyla shrugged, rearranging her sleeve along her arm. “I expect this is the sort of tale that all peoples have, to prevent children from wandering off into the forest. Do as your parents tell you and be home by dark or the changeling will get you!”
Eva smiled. “A lot of cultures have cautionary tales like that. It’s true. But sometimes there’s a seed of truth in stories.”
“You do not dismiss them?” Teyla’s forehead rose, what would have been eyebrows if she had them.
“Stories are the frame we give our lives,” she said. “They teach us what to believe about ourselves and the world around us, give us touchstones. Give us ways of seeing ourselves that are either productive or not.” Eva took a sip of cold coffee. “A few years ago I was working with kids who had been in a natural disaster, a terrible hurricane. Many of them had lost their homes, their schools, everything they had. Some of them had lost their parents or brothers and sisters. Very hard stuff. And so one of the frames we were working with was encouraging them to write their stories as superhero origin stories.” Teyla looked quizzical. “Like in comic books,” Eva said. “A lot of superheroes became who they were because of something terrible that happened when they were a child. Their parents were gunned down in front of them. Their world was destroyed. They were pursued and hunted when they developed mutant powers. All kinds of things. But in the stories, it’s the origin story that makes the superhero who he or she is. So when we encourage the kids to frame the terrible things that have happened to them as part of a superhero origin story, what we’re doing is giving them a way of looking at themselves as someone who will transcend the tragedy. They’re going to be super. They’re going to come out of this aware of their special gifts, strong people who have a brilliant future.”
Eva took another sip of coffee. “In a very real sense, we become who we dreamed of becoming. We inhabit the story we tell about ourselves. But beyond that, myths and legends often are a way of passing down things that happened in the distant past.”
“You’re saying the changeling story may be true?” Teyla asked.
“I’m saying there may be a seed of truth in it. And you know that on some level, and your subconscious is trying to help you put the pieces together.”
“And when I do?” Teyla asked.
“Then you tell the story.”
Teyla was silent, and Eva rested her chin on her fingertips. “Let me tell you a story,” she said.
“Truly?” Teyla smiled again, odd and fleeting on a Wraith face. “I will hear your story, Dr. Robinson.”
“This is a story about both of us, and as far as I know, it’s true.” Eva marshaled her thoughts and began. “Once, a long time ago on the steppes of Central Asia, there was a woman. Her people were nomadic like yours were, pastoral people who followed their herds on the open seas of grass. They lived in tents and yurts built of animal hide, and they left no buildings.”
“One day, in the last years of the war between the Ancients and the Wraith, the Ancients came among them and took her away. She came here, to the Pegasus Galaxy.” Eva took a deep breath. “We don’t know if she came alone, or with many of her people. We don’t know if she came willingly, as an ally or a soldier or an explorer. Maybe she came as a wife or a lover. Maybe she came as a daughter. Or maybe she came as a drugged captive in the hold of a cargo ship. We’ll never know how she came. We just know she did. And we know one other thing about her.”
“What is that?” Teyla asked.
“She had a baby, a little girl. Maybe she had more than one. Maybe she had ten children. But she had at least one daughter, because through her daughter her mitochondrial DNA comes down to you. It passes through the female line, and like twenty percent of the people here that Carson has tested, yours comes from Earth. Yours comes from the steppes of Central Asia.” Eva laced her hands around her coffee cup. “We know something else. When Atlantis fell, when the Wraith destroyed their civilization, she lived. Somehow, in everything that happened, she wasn’t killed. She and her daughter survived. We know they did, because you are here, you and Torren who carry her mitochondrial DNA. She stands among your foremothers as surely as the Queen who gave you her Gift.”
“You are the story,” Teyla whispered. “It’s in your blood.” She looked up, her eyes meeting Eva’s. “And what happened to her kin?”
“The ones who stayed on Earth went in many directions,” Eva said. “There are people all over the world who have the same type. Some of them went east, and the type shows up in Siberia and northernmost China. Some went west, to the very edge of the known world, to Ireland and Cornwall and Brittany. And some went south, the most of them. The type is most common among the Pashtun peoples in Iran and Afghanistan.” Eva smiled. “Our mitochondrial DNA tells a powerful story. We are all, every person on Earth, descended from a single foremother an incalculably long time ago, and all our DNA is a variation on hers. We call her the African Eve, and you’re her daughter as much as I am. Once, a long time ago, there were two sisters and they said goodbye to one another. My foremother stayed in Africa, and yours began a long trek northwards, the first step on a journey of millions of lightyears.” She leaned forward, meeting Teyla’s eyes. “But the important thing is that it began with two sisters.”
“No,” Teyla said, and her eyes were hooded. “It began with three sisters.” She lifted her face and shook her head. “I am standing on the edge of something so enormous and so terrible that I do not even know how to phrase it.” She let out a long breath, her face inscrutable in its mask of plastic surgery. “I think I begin to see what Elizabeth meant, and it is a story so dark with blood that I recoil at it. I do not know what to do with this story.”
She got up and paced to the windows, stood with her hands against the glass, looking out at the snow. “I will give you a story,” she said at last. “Not the dark one, but the one everyone knows. The one all of my people know.” Teyla paused, her long green claws against the falling flakes outside. “Once, long ago in the beginnings of time, there were the Ancestors, and they dwelled in paradise. There was no hunger and no war, no danger and no illness. And yet they were discontent. And one among them said, ‘Let us make children in our own image, that we may joy in them, and in their precocious follies delight.’ And so they did. Ten men and ten women they made, each in the image of one of the Ancestors, tall and short, dark and fair, blue eyed and brown eyed. And they awakened them in paradise, and took them to their hearts.”