Three (Overcrossed) Pasts John Sheppard Might Be Hiding, by Sophonisba [backstory challenge]
-title- Three (Overcrossed) Pasts John Sheppard Might Be Hiding
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-rating- Mostly suitable for general audiences; some foul language.
-spoilers- I'm not sure that a character's name counts as a spoiler. Either one of them.
-characters- Sheppard; guest appearance by Holland and, more subtly, by Rodney and Teyla, as well as references to other characters.
-disclaimer- Not mine. Not, not, not mine -- except maybe the Egyptian transcriptions: since we know little beyond the fact that Amon's name had come to be pronounced "Ama'ana" by the New Kingdom, that final "t" sounds were probably dropped in the singular, and that Ra's name had added an "ah" sound to elide the sound-made-while-narrowing-the-back-of-your-throat-into-a-tube following the probable "ree," I have indulged in the ancient and honored practice of Making Vowels Up. More disclaimers at end.
-word count- 5321
-summary- Three crossovers, three pasts that might lie behind Major Sheppard's facade.
Three (Overcrossed) Pasts John Sheppard Might Be Hiding
1. Relict
John and Evie Sheppard had been arguing for years over whether it was better for a career military man to bring his family with him here, there, and everywhere or to settle them in one place and only see them during his rare leaves.
John had pointed out that it wasn't as if he'd be settling them in some strange place; his and her ancestors had lived in Grantville since the town was founded, and between the two of them they were related to half the people in the town and surrounds and connected somehow or another to most of the other half. Besides, while they'd tried it her way for a while, Evie'd agreed to go back home now that the baby had been coming even before they found that this time he'd be going to a combat zone.
At least he'd managed a leave that coincided with the baby's birth -- John suspected that they were probably up for marriage counseling when he got back anyway, but at least he wasn't a complete failure as a husband and father, even if he had kissed wife and child goodbye before going off and leaving them (and his parents and sisters and cousins and aunts and former schoolmates and the rest of his hometown) safe behind while he went off to war.
The last communication they'd exchanged had gotten a bit acrimonious, and he was disappointed but not surprised that she hadn't answered his note of apology. At least Ann would mention how Evie was doing in her next letter to her scapegrace brother, whenever that arrived -- Ann might have gotten distracted by their neighbor Rita's wedding to the outsider, John decided.
It was -- the worst part was knowing that some of this place would come back with him no matter what, and he'd decided that he wouldn't keep it all to himself once it was over, but for now it had to be not-home, because he needed home to stay home to remind him that there was more than this, the rooms that no matter how cleaned they were still felt filthy and the humor (both gallows and defiant) and the nearly-worn-out books that were passed from hand to hand until they were lost to one cause or another; John had developed a new appreciation for "The Miracle of Purun Bhagat" and a sneaking fondness for a mindbogglingly bad series of caveman historical erotica and insomnia cure.
When the mail came, he docilely waited his turn. It was only a piece of government mail, and he put it aside for that day's flight, remembering to retrieve it at the last moment and deciding that he might as well see what it was that had been important enough to be sent government priority.
He read it from beginning to end.
Then he read it again.
His blood drummed in his ears, very nearly the low sound Kipling had described, but it couldn't be, and anyway maybe it hadn't been a landslip, it wasn't exactly on the side per se of the mountain. It hadn't really been in a fluvial plain, either. Sinkholes? Firedamp? Forest fire, maybe, but there hadn't been that much forest anymore and anyway something that big should have made the news, not that they got their news on the most reliable of schedules, and possibly Adams was right that you had to reduce it to burgers to start picturing it. Except that John very nearly could, if only it hadn't been that it wasn't right. It could be a hoax, but the watermark was right, and the State of West Virginia letterhead, and everything.
He read it again, hoping to draw meaning from it this time, expecting that this time he would see the explanation of means that his eyes must have skipped over the last time. And the time before that.
Maybe he should sit. He thought maybe he was feeling faint, the symptoms that had been drummed into them because they could be the only sign they'd ever have of high blood loss.
John went to lie down on his assigned bed, absently handing the letter to Holland when the man wanted to say something to him. Lying down was good. Maybe he'd caught a bit of sunstroke or something, and if he just had a moment to get his shit together he'd be fine for later without his commander having to know.
Behind him, Holland cursed softly and devoutly as he read the letter informing one John Sheppard that he was one of the very few inhabitants of Grantville to survive the town having been wiped off the face of the map.
*
2. Death by Ra
Most notorious of the finds on the Elliot Expedition was the so-called "Curse Hoax," the unopened "tomb" that proved to have next-to-no grave goods, no canopic jars, inscriptions talking about curses and things better left untouched, a scroll in a box labeled "Do not read" -- it proved to be half-gibberish, and although it was carefully preserved between two panes of glass it suffered damage in transit, rendering large portions illegible; a loss worse by the fact that its photographs and dictation had been on one of the two computers that were stolen -- and a crudely-ornamented sarcophagus (ornamented with spells meant to keep the deceased in) that was mistaken for a cenotaph until two separate sets of x-rays proved a body within. One that had, between the exposures, shifted in the handling.
The lack of perishable materials made it hard to date the artifacts -- other than "in the style of the Second Intermediate Period" -- but other aspects suggested that the hoax might have been perpetrated as long ago as Greek or Roman times, although the reason remained a frustrating blank. One of the expedition's graduate students suggested that it had been intended to be perpetrated on someone who had died or been recalled to Rome before he could break the seal on the false tomb, and that leaving it in place would have aroused less question than taking it apart again. Another suggested that it had been used to hide a murder victim, although she had no good explanation for why "sealed up in an elaborate hoax" would have been a safer option than "feed to crocodile."
It was hoped that examination of the corpse would provide answers to at least some questions; however, when the contents of the not-tomb were shipped back to New York, the corpse and several of the small portable valuable items were absconded with before the former was even removed from its inner coffin. Dark things were muttered, particularly about the Egyptian Department of Antiquities, but nothing was ever proved.
A very long time ago, before it all went to the Devourer so spectacularly, he used to call Elisheva Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana, and she used to call him Yehohanan. It is at least partly for this reason that he settles on "John Sheppard" as a nicely inconspicuous name.
(The other is that -- even for ruthless beings with a considerable collection of artifacts valuable for more than their mere materials and thus with the wealth of same -- it is much easier to establish a false identity when one takes over a perfectly good identity that once belonged to someone else. Of the dead and unconnected men of the appropriate age whose identities he could have bought, the former John Sheppard both suited his needs and had a name that intrigued his interest.)
His plan was simple, at first: learn the language of these thieves-non-thieves. (He had docilely let himself be conveyed to what, from what of the not-thieves' language he had picked up from watching and waiting, was a fine large town [perhaps as big, he had thought, as Hat-Wuãri' the capital], knowing that it is easier even for one such as him to hide in a place full of people than the middle of nowhere.) Acquire an identity, preferably one that would stand up to a closer investigation than the silly anagrams he had begun using once he devised a way to sneak into the libraries. If possible, even before that, discover a way to synthesize or plain old grow tanna leaves -- he could easily picture Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana's scorn (Oh, for the sake of El and Apopi and all the naturu that ever were, you can't imagine that I'd care how you look if only you survive this one?), but for the necessary dealings with other people that would need to take place, it helps not to look like something that crawled up out of the desert after slowly desiccating. Once he had established a home of sorts, find Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana and defy any man or beast or god to tear them asunder.
The first parts of this plan were simple enough to implement, if not precisely easy. It was the last that proved the difficulty.
We shall defeat the Devourer, we shall beguile the Openers of the Ways, we shall set Sutokh and Apopi on to cast down each other, Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana had promised, eyes blazing with the light of the mixtures of thaumaturgy and theurgy she and he had ruthlessly harnessed to their bidding as she gazed down at him, and though they shall have slain us or burned us or unwritten our names from existence, our seven souls shall once again gather in bodies in this Hither World and my souls shall find yours! She'd paused for a moment and shifted enticingly, sweat gleaming on her skin and the fine copper chains of her wig clinking back and forth. It'll be easier, though, if we can hang on to the bodies we have now. I'll have to see what I can do about that.
But when what she had dared grew too great and the God's Wife of Sutokh had had her murdered, fearing that her sister Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana would drive the Great House of the North to her own tune or that of the House of `Oosa' and not that of the House of Sutokh, although he had known the spells his love had devised with him and called on her and his acolytes to perform them on her corpse, one of them had betrayed him to his fellow-priests of Rîã, had let the temple and palace guards rush in and tear her from his arms, take her to be prepared according to the rites of the priests of Yanapu (which even the northern invaders had adopted, as they had adopted most things of the Two Lands when they settled in to rule the North).
He had known that Pyrîã had long since chosen to take direction from Hat-Wuãri', to move towards syncretion of Rîã and Sutokh-Apopi (despite the fact that the old scrolls named Yipepi the eternal enemy of Rîã and all his forms), to betray those of its own who dared work, not even for Southern reconquest, but for the continued independence and possible autonomy of the Southern lands to the Snake-Guards.
He had not known that they would turn on him when he sought something that had nothing to do with the South, that they would have his acolytes bind him with the spells he had used on her, claiming coercion and repentance (whispering I'm sorry, I'm sorry, this is the only way, it'll work, you'll see), binding him away from coming near where she would have gone. If they had let her go.
And whether her souls were each in their appropriate places in the West and her House of Eternity, awaiting her command, or whether they wandered the Red Land able to go neither here nor there, she would have gathered her souls to settle again in a body as these many speaking of reincarnation claimed -- but there were over six billion people walking the face of the earth, and he was unlikely to trip over her on the streets.
And so -- because John could not very well sit in one place and expect the world to wait with him, and because tanna cost even when he grew it in pots for his own use -- he gathered up his learning and earned the certificate of knowledge called a GED, and then sought college schooling through the program called ROTC, and it was during that that his instructors looked at his record and told him that he had been chosen to learn to fly.
As a boy he had loved to sail in a skiff on the River, the wind on his head; as a youth, he had been chosen to learn to drive a chariot, those mysterious wheeled carrying-platforms drawn by horses, across fields and into battles, and he had been sure that that was the most awesome rush ever. As a man, he had been drawn into Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana's workings, holding the power she called in and sometimes letting it flow out through him, and been sure that surely this was the best, that nothing could be more wonderful than this.
But flying rose effortlessly above all these, whether it were the clear and sharp beauty of going as fast as the aircraft could go, or the more subdued wonder of takeoffs and landings, or the twisted, sweating hunger of wrestling her through a storm or some mechanical glitch. This was what he wanted. This was what, when he found Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana again, he would share with her, teaching her to copilot so that they might take their craft up into the wild blue, soaring like the Boat of the Sun over desert and fertile land and Great Green alike, landing only to refuel and couple.
And even though it was taking a long time indeed to find her -- once, John had written her name on a scrap of paper and asked a librarian to find information; the woman had taken a look, said "King Tut's queen was an Ankhes-en-Amon," and found him mentions of that Great Royal Wife and five other ladies of the same name, none of whom were his -- his new life was sweet (perhaps, he thought, he had changed because the incantation that woke him had been read by a scholar who pronounced every consonant and an entirely new set of vowels, turning it into oddly melodic gibberish): he managed one way or another to get his regular essence of tanna leaves without drawing it to the Air Force's attention (and if he missed some, he would look aged before he dried out, and thus able to pass it off as stress), he had his people to tend (as, long before, he had tended those sworn to the service of Rîã before Rîã's service betrayed him), and he could fly.
Then it went to pieces anyway. He's never been the first to betray his service, but he's never been the first to let go. He liked the White Land (as he thinks of Antarctica) because it's nothing like anywhere that might have been home, and because its storms remind him of Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana, and because while he still didn't get to fly as much as he'd like he could spend his grounded days doing his best to ground-fly on snow or ice or water, and because while it's an expensive pain in the ass to get tanna leaves in Antarctica, the farther from tropical the climate the less of them he actually needs to maintain a human-normal appearance.
And then he flew a General to a place that officially wasn't there, and dodged an attack squid, and sat in a chair (to the consternation of assorted sages), and met a woman with Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana's face.
Even before they stepped through the Gate to Atlantis, he'd noticed some of the differences between Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana and Dr. Elizabeth Weir. (For one thing, Elizabeth doesn't shave her head.) Elizabeth persuades people what to do, while Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana had used her status as a minor daughter of the King of the North and her undeniable talents to intimidate people into following her peremptory commands. Elizabeth waits for a consensus or at least for input; Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana had charged ahead, fearless, expecting the rest of the world to follow her or get out of her way.
Elizabeth wasn't the one to give him the capsule history of the Stargate Program; that fell to the Scottish and Canadian guys who were excited over the chair and to General O'Neill. (Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana would have gloated, mercilessly, over the fact that she was perfectly right that Sutokh-Yipepi and by extension the first Apopi were big fat lying liars trying to use people and to act as Rîã on a smaller scale.) Apparently Rîã, too, had never been a natar as John understands naturu -- in which case, he feels no guilt whatsoever over shamelessly exploiting Rîã and Rîã's power for Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana's resurrection spell. It probably draws off the fake `Oosa' as well, and if he ever finds the rest of the ingredients again (such as, oh, lotus), he's absolutely going to use it on any of his men who get killed.
At first he thought Elizabeth, unlike the love of his first life, wasn't arrogant; months in Atlantis taught him that she was nearly as arrogant as Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana, but with the bleak distance of the desert rather than the fierce fury of the storm. They taught him, too, that a terrifyingly brilliant woman who'd learned caution would have wielded that caution like a club and then charged in in its wake; that, indeed, toning down certain qualities was by no means the same as transmuting them into other qualities entirely; that, push it as he might, he simply did not react to Elizabeth as a man does to a woman (or, perhaps, only as a man does to a woman, but not as a man does to the lady he wants); and that, astonishing facial resemblance aside, short of having gone through so much in so many lives that her souls would have become different things entirely, Dr. Elizabeth Weir is not and cannot have been Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana daughter of Apopi, Handmaiden of `Oosa'.
But she is his friend, and Atlantis is his home, and its people are his people, and he'd already accepted that if/when he found Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana she might be happily married with three kids and he'd have to nobly step aside and keep watch so that he could swoop in and save the day if anything ever threatened her or them. Besides, tanna grows wild all over Pegasus and has become a staple of their diet here.
*
3. Descent of Man
He had seldom felt a strong connection to his body, even in the days when he walked in it. Bodies were messy things, to be used in the service of minds -- their own, preferably; another more intelligent one, sometimes, in the pursuit of a greater goal.
The first time he had stumbled, by fortunate mischance, upon the secret of how to ascend beyond it, only the memories of the people he had left behind, the knowledge of the one villain who had escaped his net, and the losses that his friend had suffered had drawn him back to physicality, to take up his life again with clumsy, faltering explanations of where he had been in the meantime. The second and lasting time, he had outlived all those who would otherwise have bid him stay; he had questions he wanted answered, and affairs of an (unsurprisingly) aging body he'd as soon not have to deal with, and a promise that here, at last, he might find a peace more lasting than the hard-won space between the other inroads on his time, and objects of study more fascinating yet than the social honeybee.
And there had been flying, soaring through the depths of the universe he'd been too busy to notice any but the most local details of -- surely he could not have flown in the half-remembered time of his first ascension, or even the second most dangerous man could not have tempted him back, perhaps not even the future his then-widowed friend was facing, not compared to the freedom and the ecstasy of flight -- a part of something more eternal than the stars...
...and of something more unknowingly selfish than even the transgressors of laws he had, once, marked and ensnared for a pasttime and as a way of doing something for the world that wouldn't require too much of him.
He could understand -- somewhat -- the need to let people make mistakes on their own (as he and his brother had been let), to learn rather than always be sheltered. He could well believe that those who found it too painful to watch might well choose to go look at something else.
But to hold it none of their business -- save to punish those who made it their business, making "none of their affair" as pretty a lie as any of the plausible fellows he'd dealt with could spin -- and to watch as he had watched, but without the noting for later reference and use, the will as well as the ability to lift a purse from a pickpocket and restore it to its none-the-wiser owner, the ability to realize that just because they could not possibly save them all did not mean that they could do a little in a small way to help some save themselves... this was nothing he wanted any part of.
This was something his friend (his best friend, one of his new acquaintances had said, and he'd stared her down: many people might be friends-with-qualifiers, but only one had ever been a friend unqualified and unequalled) would have had even less patience with: his friend had always seen the foibles of people with more pity and more patience and more empathy than he himself could muster, but with a corresponding revulsion for those who deliberately shirked the obligations that privilege should inspire them with.
His friend, doubtless, would have defied the Other Ascended before now, and taken whatever punishment they chose to give -- not proudly, for the wild joy in self-vindication had been thought too Continental for his friend's blood, but simply, calmly, accepting it as a natural if unfair consequence of right actions, as befit the military man he had been so long ago.
But he, himself, had watched patterns long enough to know that the simplest answer is not always the right one, and that defiance is empty unless one does something -- and that, should one only have one chance of action, to maximize the effects of said action is all the more important.
And that, given the Others' usual choices of punishments, it might be that he could arrange to be put somewhere where even that might further his aims, imprecise as they now were. Or that, better yet, he might anticipate their punishment and only have it enforced on him after he placed himself.
After all, it was nothing he had not done before, albeit on a much lesser scale and with the assistance both of certain public servants who'd proved to be, if foolish, not as irredeemably so as his brother would have it, and, the first time, of the woman -- and both of those had proved necessary that time, the first to draw the net about all of his targets, the latter to prevent him from even at the eleventh hour snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Without such aid, it would take longer -- he might, in the end, be unable to take care of them all, but indifference did not need the same sort of opposition as malfeasance or outright treachery, no matter how much more damaging it might be to all parties concerned in the long run -- but he was confident that he would, and the self-satisfied Ancients he found himself dealing with would not know what had hit them.
And so he laid his plans, and worked with great subtlety and skill, until one morning he absently looked in on one of his indirect descendants, one who bore a great resemblance to his brother as a child.
He very nearly disrupted the electrical current flowing to the boy's house in his startlement; every sense save the physical told him that this was his brother, with his superiority and his indolence and his razor-sharp mind but without his memory, and that apparently unbeknownst to the Ascended he dwelt among, the Tibetan monks that he had met during his first period of dead-not-dead had been more right than not about the transmigration of souls.
Nor was this an isolated occurence: startled, looking down the possibilities of this his brother's new life, he saw that more likely than not it would be entwined with several other familiar souls. The man who had been the best of the first era of policemen to use their heads for something other than walking upright; the man who had been the man who, predating that era, had started out one of the very worst of the lumps and grown to be one of the better inspectors. The man who had been his friend's wife -- and that had been a quite unwarranted surprise, even more than the appearance that that man would likely choose to be a doctor in his own right; the man who had been his housekeeper, and the woman who had been... the woman who. Perhaps even, it seemed, some of the Irregulars, changed in class or race or sex.
If that did not suggest an appropriate time to put his plan into action, nothing would, and he quickly moved about the universe, working on a level so rarefied that no one corporeal would be able to comprehend the meaning or significance of his actions.
He was only delayed by conversations three times: once by an interminable argument over whether or not the Asgard might or might not be on the verge of stumbling across Ascension themselves, and if so, what should be done about that short of outright helping them (the latter "spoken" in a manner that would have better suited words entirely unfit for polite conversation), which he quietly escaped from as soon as ever he could; once by a discussion he initiated with those who were watching the galaxy of the Malefactori, rechecking to make completely sure that in quelling Charybdis he would not be loosing Scylla; and once, in a small galaxy where several of the Ascended or their parents or grandparents had once dwelt in the body, by one of the most annoying of the Ancients (the one who had disbelieved, until forced to by thorough examination of the evidence, that he had indeed Ascended without the assistance of any who had already reached that state).
Ela the annoying had wanted to point out the way that even the more spiritual of the subsistence cultures that currently scraped out livings in said galaxy (in the shadow of the best instance of Ancient indifference taken to an extreme that functioned as ongoing malfeasance. By contrast, when he had turned a murderer over to the authorities, he had known that the authorities would hang said murderer; when he had unearthed a trail leading to someone who did not deserve to hang, he had acted to prevent said someone from being hanged; and when his investigations had placed other people in danger, he had acted to minimize said danger, and that had been even before he had been made free of higher-planar abilities) were preoccupied with such mundane, bodily matters as feeding their children and sheltering their families and preventing even their elders from falling ill; truly, any claim that they might so much as approach the level of the Alterans was utterly risible.
He bethought himself, not for the first time, of his brother's usual dictum that the person(s) in question were clearly on a quite different level than the speaker; but the stakes here were far higher than a mere royal fee, and he smiled pleasantly (faulty as that human expression is to describe the greeting-meetings of radiant beings of light, it has the benefit of brevity).
"Just look at them," Ela went on, encouraged. "All that discussion, when they'll eat and sleep and pair off to produce what, another living device that makes messes at both ends?"
He answered automatically -- he must have -- for he had looked, and he had seen the girl-child that two of the barbarians in question would make if they were left to themselves.
Who would be bright and beautiful and fierce and wise, who would never turn her back on a friend, who would follow the man who was fortunate enough to have her name him friend into the valley of the shadow of death or the depths of hell itself, without question or pause, but with eyes wide open.
Who would have been the man who was his friend.
Who would be born into the Pegasus Galaxy, when all his plans called for him to once more take corporeal form on the Milky Way world of his birth.
A lesser man might have quailed, might have turned aside from the path or sought a way to alter it at this late date in order to fit in some measure of personal happiness.
But the plans were now set and set well, and to draw back now would be to cause the lives of hundreds of millions if not billions of sentient beings, if not actively to grow worse, to keep them at their level of misery without any hope of it growing better in their lifetimes. Among them his people, those beings whom for one cause or another he had come to reckon as his responsibility.
And so he bid Ela farewell after a few rounds of polite nothings, and went to fulfill his plan, knowing that whether he would remember it or not the world was an immeasurably richer place for his friend's being in it.
The first any of the Ascended knew of his plan was when the entire gate network came to life, burning brightly as addresses rewrote themselves and the very shapes of the locus-symbols changed slightly. The other changes followed hard on its heels, and he dove for the Earth of his getting while the other Ascended floated around, gobsmacked. He shaped the body of the boy he had been as quickly as he might and threw himself into it barely ahead of Ela and Torus. The body lurched down the streets of the town he'd chosen as they tried to roust him out of it and he fought to stay within; then it fell heavily against a passerby as Ela and Torus were joined by other Ascended and changed tactics, sealing off trains of memory one by one as he fought a desperate, rearguard action.
"What the-- hang on, kid!" the man he'd fallen against blurted, holding him up with one arm behind his shoulders.
He was sealing off memories himself now, before his former fellows could get to them, in the forlorn hope that what he had locked away he would be able to draw forth, and missed the demand for his name.
"John," he said instead, answering by chance as he spoke his friend's Christian name for once, as he had never dared do when referring or speaking to that John in life; he had no intention of repeating that mistake should he get the chance, unlikely as it seemed for some reason he'd forgotten.
I owe an immense creative debt to Eric Flint (Go. Read 1632), to Nina Wilcox Putnam and Richard Shayer (who were possibly influenced by Bram Stoker when writing The Mummy), and to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Also to whomever came up with tanna leaves for the movie sequels, and to Kelley L. Ross's article on the pronunciation of Ancient Egyptian.
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-rating- Mostly suitable for general audiences; some foul language.
-spoilers- I'm not sure that a character's name counts as a spoiler. Either one of them.
-characters- Sheppard; guest appearance by Holland and, more subtly, by Rodney and Teyla, as well as references to other characters.
-disclaimer- Not mine. Not, not, not mine -- except maybe the Egyptian transcriptions: since we know little beyond the fact that Amon's name had come to be pronounced "Ama'ana" by the New Kingdom, that final "t" sounds were probably dropped in the singular, and that Ra's name had added an "ah" sound to elide the sound-made-while-narrowing-the-back-of-your-throat-into-a-tube following the probable "ree," I have indulged in the ancient and honored practice of Making Vowels Up. More disclaimers at end.
-word count- 5321
-summary- Three crossovers, three pasts that might lie behind Major Sheppard's facade.
Three (Overcrossed) Pasts John Sheppard Might Be Hiding
1. Relict
John and Evie Sheppard had been arguing for years over whether it was better for a career military man to bring his family with him here, there, and everywhere or to settle them in one place and only see them during his rare leaves.
John had pointed out that it wasn't as if he'd be settling them in some strange place; his and her ancestors had lived in Grantville since the town was founded, and between the two of them they were related to half the people in the town and surrounds and connected somehow or another to most of the other half. Besides, while they'd tried it her way for a while, Evie'd agreed to go back home now that the baby had been coming even before they found that this time he'd be going to a combat zone.
At least he'd managed a leave that coincided with the baby's birth -- John suspected that they were probably up for marriage counseling when he got back anyway, but at least he wasn't a complete failure as a husband and father, even if he had kissed wife and child goodbye before going off and leaving them (and his parents and sisters and cousins and aunts and former schoolmates and the rest of his hometown) safe behind while he went off to war.
The last communication they'd exchanged had gotten a bit acrimonious, and he was disappointed but not surprised that she hadn't answered his note of apology. At least Ann would mention how Evie was doing in her next letter to her scapegrace brother, whenever that arrived -- Ann might have gotten distracted by their neighbor Rita's wedding to the outsider, John decided.
It was -- the worst part was knowing that some of this place would come back with him no matter what, and he'd decided that he wouldn't keep it all to himself once it was over, but for now it had to be not-home, because he needed home to stay home to remind him that there was more than this, the rooms that no matter how cleaned they were still felt filthy and the humor (both gallows and defiant) and the nearly-worn-out books that were passed from hand to hand until they were lost to one cause or another; John had developed a new appreciation for "The Miracle of Purun Bhagat" and a sneaking fondness for a mindbogglingly bad series of caveman historical erotica and insomnia cure.
When the mail came, he docilely waited his turn. It was only a piece of government mail, and he put it aside for that day's flight, remembering to retrieve it at the last moment and deciding that he might as well see what it was that had been important enough to be sent government priority.
He read it from beginning to end.
Then he read it again.
His blood drummed in his ears, very nearly the low sound Kipling had described, but it couldn't be, and anyway maybe it hadn't been a landslip, it wasn't exactly on the side per se of the mountain. It hadn't really been in a fluvial plain, either. Sinkholes? Firedamp? Forest fire, maybe, but there hadn't been that much forest anymore and anyway something that big should have made the news, not that they got their news on the most reliable of schedules, and possibly Adams was right that you had to reduce it to burgers to start picturing it. Except that John very nearly could, if only it hadn't been that it wasn't right. It could be a hoax, but the watermark was right, and the State of West Virginia letterhead, and everything.
He read it again, hoping to draw meaning from it this time, expecting that this time he would see the explanation of means that his eyes must have skipped over the last time. And the time before that.
Maybe he should sit. He thought maybe he was feeling faint, the symptoms that had been drummed into them because they could be the only sign they'd ever have of high blood loss.
John went to lie down on his assigned bed, absently handing the letter to Holland when the man wanted to say something to him. Lying down was good. Maybe he'd caught a bit of sunstroke or something, and if he just had a moment to get his shit together he'd be fine for later without his commander having to know.
Behind him, Holland cursed softly and devoutly as he read the letter informing one John Sheppard that he was one of the very few inhabitants of Grantville to survive the town having been wiped off the face of the map.
*
2. Death by Ra
Most notorious of the finds on the Elliot Expedition was the so-called "Curse Hoax," the unopened "tomb" that proved to have next-to-no grave goods, no canopic jars, inscriptions talking about curses and things better left untouched, a scroll in a box labeled "Do not read" -- it proved to be half-gibberish, and although it was carefully preserved between two panes of glass it suffered damage in transit, rendering large portions illegible; a loss worse by the fact that its photographs and dictation had been on one of the two computers that were stolen -- and a crudely-ornamented sarcophagus (ornamented with spells meant to keep the deceased in) that was mistaken for a cenotaph until two separate sets of x-rays proved a body within. One that had, between the exposures, shifted in the handling.
The lack of perishable materials made it hard to date the artifacts -- other than "in the style of the Second Intermediate Period" -- but other aspects suggested that the hoax might have been perpetrated as long ago as Greek or Roman times, although the reason remained a frustrating blank. One of the expedition's graduate students suggested that it had been intended to be perpetrated on someone who had died or been recalled to Rome before he could break the seal on the false tomb, and that leaving it in place would have aroused less question than taking it apart again. Another suggested that it had been used to hide a murder victim, although she had no good explanation for why "sealed up in an elaborate hoax" would have been a safer option than "feed to crocodile."
It was hoped that examination of the corpse would provide answers to at least some questions; however, when the contents of the not-tomb were shipped back to New York, the corpse and several of the small portable valuable items were absconded with before the former was even removed from its inner coffin. Dark things were muttered, particularly about the Egyptian Department of Antiquities, but nothing was ever proved.
A very long time ago, before it all went to the Devourer so spectacularly, he used to call Elisheva Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana, and she used to call him Yehohanan. It is at least partly for this reason that he settles on "John Sheppard" as a nicely inconspicuous name.
(The other is that -- even for ruthless beings with a considerable collection of artifacts valuable for more than their mere materials and thus with the wealth of same -- it is much easier to establish a false identity when one takes over a perfectly good identity that once belonged to someone else. Of the dead and unconnected men of the appropriate age whose identities he could have bought, the former John Sheppard both suited his needs and had a name that intrigued his interest.)
His plan was simple, at first: learn the language of these thieves-non-thieves. (He had docilely let himself be conveyed to what, from what of the not-thieves' language he had picked up from watching and waiting, was a fine large town [perhaps as big, he had thought, as Hat-Wuãri' the capital], knowing that it is easier even for one such as him to hide in a place full of people than the middle of nowhere.) Acquire an identity, preferably one that would stand up to a closer investigation than the silly anagrams he had begun using once he devised a way to sneak into the libraries. If possible, even before that, discover a way to synthesize or plain old grow tanna leaves -- he could easily picture Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana's scorn (Oh, for the sake of El and Apopi and all the naturu that ever were, you can't imagine that I'd care how you look if only you survive this one?), but for the necessary dealings with other people that would need to take place, it helps not to look like something that crawled up out of the desert after slowly desiccating. Once he had established a home of sorts, find Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana and defy any man or beast or god to tear them asunder.
The first parts of this plan were simple enough to implement, if not precisely easy. It was the last that proved the difficulty.
We shall defeat the Devourer, we shall beguile the Openers of the Ways, we shall set Sutokh and Apopi on to cast down each other, Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana had promised, eyes blazing with the light of the mixtures of thaumaturgy and theurgy she and he had ruthlessly harnessed to their bidding as she gazed down at him, and though they shall have slain us or burned us or unwritten our names from existence, our seven souls shall once again gather in bodies in this Hither World and my souls shall find yours! She'd paused for a moment and shifted enticingly, sweat gleaming on her skin and the fine copper chains of her wig clinking back and forth. It'll be easier, though, if we can hang on to the bodies we have now. I'll have to see what I can do about that.
But when what she had dared grew too great and the God's Wife of Sutokh had had her murdered, fearing that her sister Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana would drive the Great House of the North to her own tune or that of the House of `Oosa' and not that of the House of Sutokh, although he had known the spells his love had devised with him and called on her and his acolytes to perform them on her corpse, one of them had betrayed him to his fellow-priests of Rîã, had let the temple and palace guards rush in and tear her from his arms, take her to be prepared according to the rites of the priests of Yanapu (which even the northern invaders had adopted, as they had adopted most things of the Two Lands when they settled in to rule the North).
He had known that Pyrîã had long since chosen to take direction from Hat-Wuãri', to move towards syncretion of Rîã and Sutokh-Apopi (despite the fact that the old scrolls named Yipepi the eternal enemy of Rîã and all his forms), to betray those of its own who dared work, not even for Southern reconquest, but for the continued independence and possible autonomy of the Southern lands to the Snake-Guards.
He had not known that they would turn on him when he sought something that had nothing to do with the South, that they would have his acolytes bind him with the spells he had used on her, claiming coercion and repentance (whispering I'm sorry, I'm sorry, this is the only way, it'll work, you'll see), binding him away from coming near where she would have gone. If they had let her go.
And whether her souls were each in their appropriate places in the West and her House of Eternity, awaiting her command, or whether they wandered the Red Land able to go neither here nor there, she would have gathered her souls to settle again in a body as these many speaking of reincarnation claimed -- but there were over six billion people walking the face of the earth, and he was unlikely to trip over her on the streets.
And so -- because John could not very well sit in one place and expect the world to wait with him, and because tanna cost even when he grew it in pots for his own use -- he gathered up his learning and earned the certificate of knowledge called a GED, and then sought college schooling through the program called ROTC, and it was during that that his instructors looked at his record and told him that he had been chosen to learn to fly.
As a boy he had loved to sail in a skiff on the River, the wind on his head; as a youth, he had been chosen to learn to drive a chariot, those mysterious wheeled carrying-platforms drawn by horses, across fields and into battles, and he had been sure that that was the most awesome rush ever. As a man, he had been drawn into Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana's workings, holding the power she called in and sometimes letting it flow out through him, and been sure that surely this was the best, that nothing could be more wonderful than this.
But flying rose effortlessly above all these, whether it were the clear and sharp beauty of going as fast as the aircraft could go, or the more subdued wonder of takeoffs and landings, or the twisted, sweating hunger of wrestling her through a storm or some mechanical glitch. This was what he wanted. This was what, when he found Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana again, he would share with her, teaching her to copilot so that they might take their craft up into the wild blue, soaring like the Boat of the Sun over desert and fertile land and Great Green alike, landing only to refuel and couple.
And even though it was taking a long time indeed to find her -- once, John had written her name on a scrap of paper and asked a librarian to find information; the woman had taken a look, said "King Tut's queen was an Ankhes-en-Amon," and found him mentions of that Great Royal Wife and five other ladies of the same name, none of whom were his -- his new life was sweet (perhaps, he thought, he had changed because the incantation that woke him had been read by a scholar who pronounced every consonant and an entirely new set of vowels, turning it into oddly melodic gibberish): he managed one way or another to get his regular essence of tanna leaves without drawing it to the Air Force's attention (and if he missed some, he would look aged before he dried out, and thus able to pass it off as stress), he had his people to tend (as, long before, he had tended those sworn to the service of Rîã before Rîã's service betrayed him), and he could fly.
Then it went to pieces anyway. He's never been the first to betray his service, but he's never been the first to let go. He liked the White Land (as he thinks of Antarctica) because it's nothing like anywhere that might have been home, and because its storms remind him of Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana, and because while he still didn't get to fly as much as he'd like he could spend his grounded days doing his best to ground-fly on snow or ice or water, and because while it's an expensive pain in the ass to get tanna leaves in Antarctica, the farther from tropical the climate the less of them he actually needs to maintain a human-normal appearance.
And then he flew a General to a place that officially wasn't there, and dodged an attack squid, and sat in a chair (to the consternation of assorted sages), and met a woman with Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana's face.
Even before they stepped through the Gate to Atlantis, he'd noticed some of the differences between Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana and Dr. Elizabeth Weir. (For one thing, Elizabeth doesn't shave her head.) Elizabeth persuades people what to do, while Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana had used her status as a minor daughter of the King of the North and her undeniable talents to intimidate people into following her peremptory commands. Elizabeth waits for a consensus or at least for input; Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana had charged ahead, fearless, expecting the rest of the world to follow her or get out of her way.
Elizabeth wasn't the one to give him the capsule history of the Stargate Program; that fell to the Scottish and Canadian guys who were excited over the chair and to General O'Neill. (Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana would have gloated, mercilessly, over the fact that she was perfectly right that Sutokh-Yipepi and by extension the first Apopi were big fat lying liars trying to use people and to act as Rîã on a smaller scale.) Apparently Rîã, too, had never been a natar as John understands naturu -- in which case, he feels no guilt whatsoever over shamelessly exploiting Rîã and Rîã's power for Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana's resurrection spell. It probably draws off the fake `Oosa' as well, and if he ever finds the rest of the ingredients again (such as, oh, lotus), he's absolutely going to use it on any of his men who get killed.
At first he thought Elizabeth, unlike the love of his first life, wasn't arrogant; months in Atlantis taught him that she was nearly as arrogant as Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana, but with the bleak distance of the desert rather than the fierce fury of the storm. They taught him, too, that a terrifyingly brilliant woman who'd learned caution would have wielded that caution like a club and then charged in in its wake; that, indeed, toning down certain qualities was by no means the same as transmuting them into other qualities entirely; that, push it as he might, he simply did not react to Elizabeth as a man does to a woman (or, perhaps, only as a man does to a woman, but not as a man does to the lady he wants); and that, astonishing facial resemblance aside, short of having gone through so much in so many lives that her souls would have become different things entirely, Dr. Elizabeth Weir is not and cannot have been Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana daughter of Apopi, Handmaiden of `Oosa'.
But she is his friend, and Atlantis is his home, and its people are his people, and he'd already accepted that if/when he found Ãnkh-s'oon-Ama'ana she might be happily married with three kids and he'd have to nobly step aside and keep watch so that he could swoop in and save the day if anything ever threatened her or them. Besides, tanna grows wild all over Pegasus and has become a staple of their diet here.
*
3. Descent of Man
He had seldom felt a strong connection to his body, even in the days when he walked in it. Bodies were messy things, to be used in the service of minds -- their own, preferably; another more intelligent one, sometimes, in the pursuit of a greater goal.
The first time he had stumbled, by fortunate mischance, upon the secret of how to ascend beyond it, only the memories of the people he had left behind, the knowledge of the one villain who had escaped his net, and the losses that his friend had suffered had drawn him back to physicality, to take up his life again with clumsy, faltering explanations of where he had been in the meantime. The second and lasting time, he had outlived all those who would otherwise have bid him stay; he had questions he wanted answered, and affairs of an (unsurprisingly) aging body he'd as soon not have to deal with, and a promise that here, at last, he might find a peace more lasting than the hard-won space between the other inroads on his time, and objects of study more fascinating yet than the social honeybee.
And there had been flying, soaring through the depths of the universe he'd been too busy to notice any but the most local details of -- surely he could not have flown in the half-remembered time of his first ascension, or even the second most dangerous man could not have tempted him back, perhaps not even the future his then-widowed friend was facing, not compared to the freedom and the ecstasy of flight -- a part of something more eternal than the stars...
...and of something more unknowingly selfish than even the transgressors of laws he had, once, marked and ensnared for a pasttime and as a way of doing something for the world that wouldn't require too much of him.
He could understand -- somewhat -- the need to let people make mistakes on their own (as he and his brother had been let), to learn rather than always be sheltered. He could well believe that those who found it too painful to watch might well choose to go look at something else.
But to hold it none of their business -- save to punish those who made it their business, making "none of their affair" as pretty a lie as any of the plausible fellows he'd dealt with could spin -- and to watch as he had watched, but without the noting for later reference and use, the will as well as the ability to lift a purse from a pickpocket and restore it to its none-the-wiser owner, the ability to realize that just because they could not possibly save them all did not mean that they could do a little in a small way to help some save themselves... this was nothing he wanted any part of.
This was something his friend (his best friend, one of his new acquaintances had said, and he'd stared her down: many people might be friends-with-qualifiers, but only one had ever been a friend unqualified and unequalled) would have had even less patience with: his friend had always seen the foibles of people with more pity and more patience and more empathy than he himself could muster, but with a corresponding revulsion for those who deliberately shirked the obligations that privilege should inspire them with.
His friend, doubtless, would have defied the Other Ascended before now, and taken whatever punishment they chose to give -- not proudly, for the wild joy in self-vindication had been thought too Continental for his friend's blood, but simply, calmly, accepting it as a natural if unfair consequence of right actions, as befit the military man he had been so long ago.
But he, himself, had watched patterns long enough to know that the simplest answer is not always the right one, and that defiance is empty unless one does something -- and that, should one only have one chance of action, to maximize the effects of said action is all the more important.
And that, given the Others' usual choices of punishments, it might be that he could arrange to be put somewhere where even that might further his aims, imprecise as they now were. Or that, better yet, he might anticipate their punishment and only have it enforced on him after he placed himself.
After all, it was nothing he had not done before, albeit on a much lesser scale and with the assistance both of certain public servants who'd proved to be, if foolish, not as irredeemably so as his brother would have it, and, the first time, of the woman -- and both of those had proved necessary that time, the first to draw the net about all of his targets, the latter to prevent him from even at the eleventh hour snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Without such aid, it would take longer -- he might, in the end, be unable to take care of them all, but indifference did not need the same sort of opposition as malfeasance or outright treachery, no matter how much more damaging it might be to all parties concerned in the long run -- but he was confident that he would, and the self-satisfied Ancients he found himself dealing with would not know what had hit them.
And so he laid his plans, and worked with great subtlety and skill, until one morning he absently looked in on one of his indirect descendants, one who bore a great resemblance to his brother as a child.
He very nearly disrupted the electrical current flowing to the boy's house in his startlement; every sense save the physical told him that this was his brother, with his superiority and his indolence and his razor-sharp mind but without his memory, and that apparently unbeknownst to the Ascended he dwelt among, the Tibetan monks that he had met during his first period of dead-not-dead had been more right than not about the transmigration of souls.
Nor was this an isolated occurence: startled, looking down the possibilities of this his brother's new life, he saw that more likely than not it would be entwined with several other familiar souls. The man who had been the best of the first era of policemen to use their heads for something other than walking upright; the man who had been the man who, predating that era, had started out one of the very worst of the lumps and grown to be one of the better inspectors. The man who had been his friend's wife -- and that had been a quite unwarranted surprise, even more than the appearance that that man would likely choose to be a doctor in his own right; the man who had been his housekeeper, and the woman who had been... the woman who. Perhaps even, it seemed, some of the Irregulars, changed in class or race or sex.
If that did not suggest an appropriate time to put his plan into action, nothing would, and he quickly moved about the universe, working on a level so rarefied that no one corporeal would be able to comprehend the meaning or significance of his actions.
He was only delayed by conversations three times: once by an interminable argument over whether or not the Asgard might or might not be on the verge of stumbling across Ascension themselves, and if so, what should be done about that short of outright helping them (the latter "spoken" in a manner that would have better suited words entirely unfit for polite conversation), which he quietly escaped from as soon as ever he could; once by a discussion he initiated with those who were watching the galaxy of the Malefactori, rechecking to make completely sure that in quelling Charybdis he would not be loosing Scylla; and once, in a small galaxy where several of the Ascended or their parents or grandparents had once dwelt in the body, by one of the most annoying of the Ancients (the one who had disbelieved, until forced to by thorough examination of the evidence, that he had indeed Ascended without the assistance of any who had already reached that state).
Ela the annoying had wanted to point out the way that even the more spiritual of the subsistence cultures that currently scraped out livings in said galaxy (in the shadow of the best instance of Ancient indifference taken to an extreme that functioned as ongoing malfeasance. By contrast, when he had turned a murderer over to the authorities, he had known that the authorities would hang said murderer; when he had unearthed a trail leading to someone who did not deserve to hang, he had acted to prevent said someone from being hanged; and when his investigations had placed other people in danger, he had acted to minimize said danger, and that had been even before he had been made free of higher-planar abilities) were preoccupied with such mundane, bodily matters as feeding their children and sheltering their families and preventing even their elders from falling ill; truly, any claim that they might so much as approach the level of the Alterans was utterly risible.
He bethought himself, not for the first time, of his brother's usual dictum that the person(s) in question were clearly on a quite different level than the speaker; but the stakes here were far higher than a mere royal fee, and he smiled pleasantly (faulty as that human expression is to describe the greeting-meetings of radiant beings of light, it has the benefit of brevity).
"Just look at them," Ela went on, encouraged. "All that discussion, when they'll eat and sleep and pair off to produce what, another living device that makes messes at both ends?"
He answered automatically -- he must have -- for he had looked, and he had seen the girl-child that two of the barbarians in question would make if they were left to themselves.
Who would be bright and beautiful and fierce and wise, who would never turn her back on a friend, who would follow the man who was fortunate enough to have her name him friend into the valley of the shadow of death or the depths of hell itself, without question or pause, but with eyes wide open.
Who would have been the man who was his friend.
Who would be born into the Pegasus Galaxy, when all his plans called for him to once more take corporeal form on the Milky Way world of his birth.
A lesser man might have quailed, might have turned aside from the path or sought a way to alter it at this late date in order to fit in some measure of personal happiness.
But the plans were now set and set well, and to draw back now would be to cause the lives of hundreds of millions if not billions of sentient beings, if not actively to grow worse, to keep them at their level of misery without any hope of it growing better in their lifetimes. Among them his people, those beings whom for one cause or another he had come to reckon as his responsibility.
And so he bid Ela farewell after a few rounds of polite nothings, and went to fulfill his plan, knowing that whether he would remember it or not the world was an immeasurably richer place for his friend's being in it.
The first any of the Ascended knew of his plan was when the entire gate network came to life, burning brightly as addresses rewrote themselves and the very shapes of the locus-symbols changed slightly. The other changes followed hard on its heels, and he dove for the Earth of his getting while the other Ascended floated around, gobsmacked. He shaped the body of the boy he had been as quickly as he might and threw himself into it barely ahead of Ela and Torus. The body lurched down the streets of the town he'd chosen as they tried to roust him out of it and he fought to stay within; then it fell heavily against a passerby as Ela and Torus were joined by other Ascended and changed tactics, sealing off trains of memory one by one as he fought a desperate, rearguard action.
"What the-- hang on, kid!" the man he'd fallen against blurted, holding him up with one arm behind his shoulders.
He was sealing off memories himself now, before his former fellows could get to them, in the forlorn hope that what he had locked away he would be able to draw forth, and missed the demand for his name.
"John," he said instead, answering by chance as he spoke his friend's Christian name for once, as he had never dared do when referring or speaking to that John in life; he had no intention of repeating that mistake should he get the chance, unlikely as it seemed for some reason he'd forgotten.
I owe an immense creative debt to Eric Flint (Go. Read 1632), to Nina Wilcox Putnam and Richard Shayer (who were possibly influenced by Bram Stoker when writing The Mummy), and to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Also to whomever came up with tanna leaves for the movie sequels, and to Kelley L. Ross's article on the pronunciation of Ancient Egyptian.