Veil DVD Commentary: Part 1
Hey, it's done! For wishkey who wanted my thoughts on "Veil". They turned out to be rather long (and the story itself is over 7K words too) so I've got to split it up into two parts.
Link to the original story: Veil
Title: Veil
Author: Eve11
Rating: G
Written for: Tripoli
Summary: shān-gǔ ān: From the Mandarin meaning "peaceful valley" (shān-gǔ - 'mountain gorge,' valley; ān - pictorially a woman under a roof, tranquility).
Notes: Thanks for such an interesting challenge! Hope you like what I’ve done with the place. This story takes place late season 5 (between "The Warrior" and "Menace.") No spoilers, all language mistakes (and general other mistakes) are my own. Many thanks to auntiemeesh, wishkey, and fbf for all their helpful comments. fbf, you were right on point six, and I bow to your superior beta-ing wisdom. More on point 6 later...
This story was written for the 2005 Stargate Team Ficathon. The email exchange for the ficathon went like this:
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nanda: You will be writing for: Tripoli (LJ: tripoli8) Who wants: Offworld, secret societies, the Uncanny Valley. (alternately, if you wrote me original-team Moebius fic, I would be yours forever). (Uncanny Valley at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley)
And doesn't want: Nothing in particular, and don't feel obliged to fill the above requests.
me: Got it. Thanks! An apropos assignment for a cmu email address :)
nanda: Oh, thank god you didn't panic! We were a little worried about Tripoli and her robots. :) Have fun writing!
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So, yeah, this was practically my first Stargate piece, and right out of the gate I was writing for the author of Mnemophobia and The Cost of Doing Business which were both brilliant... So, I was not exactly intimidated, but it was more like, "I'd better come up with something good!"
Five weeks in, I had one or two scenes of a completely different story (still unfinished) that would have been very Octavia Butler-esque had I managed to finish it, but it was too involved. With four weeks to go, I changed direction and went back to one of my other ideas-- a vague notion of masks, body alterations, creepy puppets and Asian culture. I added the idea, "what would the society be like who actually lived IN the Uncanny Valley, and what would it do to someone from the normal space if that valley were suddenly inverted?". Which eventually produced Veil, by far the longest story I'd completed in several years.
For those who would like it, here is a quick Mandarin pronunciation guide for the story. Some of the accented text is written in unicode and may have problems switching between browsers. Sorry in advance.
ETA: (6/5/06): Updated to final version with some minor changes.
Oh, you have NO IDEA how many obsessive tweaks I did to this in those 6 months-- a word here, a phrase there...actually I could probably dig up the older version and diff it and show all the changes... but I'll spare you. On to the story:
Veil --The homophone to "Vale" is deliberate here; I liked it as a title because of that and the added benefit of a direct connotation to hidden or shrouded things.
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"It's amazing, really." Daniel sits forward in the small chair, tapping a finger on his thigh. His eyes travel the VIP room walls, neatly avoiding the door and the chair in the corner where Jack has tried to make himself as unobtrusive as possible.
I think this works okay as an openening paragraph. The dialogue is so-so but the POV description hopefully catches the reader's attention and sets up some questions (that of course doesn't get answered in the entirety until ten sections later)
"What's that?" Jack shifts in his chair. Daniel reacts to the movement, looking at Jack for the barest second before retreating back over to the bed to sit facing the wall, fingers worrying the blue fabric bedspread.
Watching Daniel this jittery makes Jack's jaw ache and his hands clench into fists. No sudden movement. No loud noise. Forget the fact he wants to explode out of this chair, grab the archaeologist by the shoulders and look him straight in the eye with a healthy dose of "Snap out of it!"
Jack lets out a slow breath. It’s only been two days. Really, Daniel is doing well, considering. Jack runs a hand through his hair and repeats his question.
"What's amazing?"
"The planet really was beautiful. We didn’t have time to take it in, to appreciate it."
Leave it to Daniel. Unbelievable.
Yeah, I'm with Jack here. But I like that despite the fact he can hardly deal with being in the same room as someone else, despite everything that happened (and I really want people to be on the edges of their seats, like "OMG what happened!?") Daniel is still an advocate for helping those that need to be helped.
"Who says I missed anything?" Jack says. "Flowers, cliffs, temples. Pretty planet--"
"Worth a second chance."
"--full of ugly, crazy people."
heh, Jack is too much fun to write.
Daniel eyes the ceiling. "If we explain to them about the Goa'uld--"
"No way. See, that would involve going back."
"Jack--"
"Can't do it. I hit my pagoda quota last time."
That earns an exasperated sigh. "What about Shen Luo?"
"What about her?"
"You don’t think we should help her?"
The grade A petulance is maddeningly normal, and it’s pissing him off. Before Jack can stop himself he’s rising up out of the chair and his voice is rising to match.
"Like she helped us? Forget it! Let'em--"
"Jack, would you just lay off!" Daniel's outburst halts Jack mid-step. He shuts his mouth and sits down, but Daniel is already in the corner, looking like he wants to climb the walls. God, his heart must be beating out of his chest.
Originally, Jack was taken to task by Doctor Fraiser, but it was an observation room then, and fbf was like, "what? how did that happen?" and then I realized it should really just be restructured to Jack and Daniel alone.
"Sorry," Jack says. "Sorry, Daniel, it's just me."
"Oh, I know." Daniel rubs at his eyes, looking wired and exhausted. "It's just I can't -- God, Jack, this is driving me nuts."
You and me both. "Give it a few more days. Doc says it's wearing off. You want me to scram?"
The italic thoughts on this part still bug me-- actually this whole section is a little rough, and there should be some more description there, instead of relying on "thought-quotes". I do like the dialogue, though.
Daniel nods. But as Jack heads for the door Daniel adds a quiet "Wait."
He turns around, his gaze meeting red-rimmed blue eyes. Daniel fidgets but keeps eye contact long enough to ask a simple question.
"How is Sam?"
Jack looks down at his hands. "As good as to be expected. They gave her something for the pain but she's still..." he waves an all-encompassing hand at Daniel, who flinches away, looking miserable. "You know."
This scene was labeled "Jack and Daniel 1" in my list of things I had to write. This was the first scene I wrote, and I wasn't actually planning for it to come first, but then after I restructured the story from more of an unattainable novel-length thing to a short story, it just kind of belonged here. I didn't realize when I originally wrote the story how much of a tension builder this first part was, but I think from the feedback I got that it did a good job setting things up non-linearly.
******************
Verb tense switch-- past tense for past, present tense for present. I'm not sure if I'd do it again that way if I were to re-write this. But originally I'd had some title like "Four days earlier" or some such, which was somewhat glaring and then became superfluous (according to one of my betas) with the tense switch.
"What is that, maybe three hundred feet?" Jack asked. This was the first time any of them had emerged from a Stargate that was fused this high into the side of a cliff [yes, they've walked out of gates fused into cliffs (New Ground), just not *this high*... my betas love me, they really do ;)], and he had to admit, it was damn impressive at first glance. If not slightly vertigo-inducing, what with the rather small ledge and rather large drop.
In terms of mountains, 300 feet isn't bad, but for being stuck on the side of a cliff and having to walk down a rickety stairway? 300 feet is *high*
Carter peered over the edge, nodding an affirmative. "Looks like it. Wow, what a view."
"Good thing we didn't get a running start," Daniel added, adjusting his pack. "They really didn't leave much room for error."
Jack looked around. The only way off the ledge was a narrow staircase chipped into the rock. "Not very practical, either," he said.
"It is a ksang'ai," Teal'c said [I love making up words!], surveying the rock face. "But it appears to be in disrepair."
Jack turned around, mindful of the drop. "A what?"
"A ceremonial gate, meant to instill awe upon the populace as their God arrives." Teal'c surveyed the terrain again. "This one has most likely been abandoned for many centuries." I think if I gathered up all my stories and did word distributions, the word "surveyed" would show up way too often. There are several others I have to watch out for. I should really write down a list.
Daniel turned. "Instilling awe? And that's different from the usual chappa'ai how?"
"The ksang'ai is accessed from the gate in an orbiting vessel, to which it is linked," Teal'c explained. "The system lord would not use it for Jaffa deployment or travel, but as part of the mythos of the subjugated culture."
"That would explain the problems Command had pinpointing its signature," Carter said. "It was almost like tracking two intertwining signals. We had to extrapolate and uncouple the naquadah feeds, and this was the only one that would lock." The key to technospeak: be as vague as humanly possible, but use specific-sounding words. Or do what Farscape does, and just cut away to a different scene, then come back when everything is explained. I like that one.
"So, it's for show?" Jack asked. "Like the good china in the dining room hutch?"
"Indeed, O'Neill. It allows for a certain -- decadence, in the construction."
"Decadence . . ." Daniel said, trailing off and staring at the rock face. "Is an understatement."
The rest of the team followed Daniel's gaze. It took a few moments for Jack to realize what they were looking at. The lines and crags in the cliff face were definitely not random. It was hard to judge the details from this angle, but something stretched away in all directions, carved into the entire side of the mountain.
Carter dropped her gear. "Holy cow. What is that?"
"Extreme makeover, Goa'uld edition," Jack said. "Let's get down."
Slightly anachronistic because Extreme Makeover: Home Edition was a few seasons away from season 5 SG1. *whistles* I didn't want to lose that line, though. Hopefully no one would have noticed had I not decided to point it out to you. It's ultimately a serious story but I think it's a good thing to try and put humor in when you can.
They descended in single file down to the valley below. The staircase was treacherous and narrow, worn down on the edges and crumbling in places. But the planet itself wasn't abandoned. Daniel pointed out wisps of smoke curling up through the forest canopy, and a few hints of red pointed roofs.
At the bottom of the stair they exited to a small clearing-- a verdant collection of trees, flowered vines, moss and slate paths, worn but well tended. The trees were close enough to shade the sun but the leaves were high and the trunks spread out, more like a garden than a forest. The land was criss-crossed with several meandering brooks.
"Do we know which system lord we're dealing with?" Carter asked, looking around.
"I’ve got a pretty good idea," Daniel said [I can totally hear Daniel saying that]. The archaeologist had turned around to study the cliff face through the trees, and now Jack, Sam and Teal’c came to his side to look. From this vantage point, the gashes in the cliff came together into a massive mural. The staircase they had just painstakingly descended was camouflaged into one of a series of bold, sweeping strokes radiating out from the center of the cliff. The gate itself was intertwined seamlessly into a pattern of circles tiled lightly across the rock. But all of those designs and marks took backstage to a single, gigantic symbol taking up the entire height of the cliff:
谷
Jack squinted. "Lord Stick House?"
Daniel sighed. "Lord Yu."
It really does look like a house with some sticks coming off of it, doesn't it? Overall, I'm not sure where the idea of the cliff came from -- my road map was much more plot-milestone and theme-driven and in these early sections I just kind of let my brain wander on the page and went with it.
"Lǎowài," came a small feminine voice behind them. "Shanguan welcomes you."
老外 (lǎowài), foreigner, honorific.
This is another early written section, just setting things up. I got a lot of comments noting that this was a very visual piece, but when I look back at it, word for word, there must be a lot coming from a few smaller sections and paragraphs. I don't tend toward metaphors or things like that. I read one article on visualization in short story writing that said the best thing to do is focus on a few key details and let the reader fill in the gaps. So I try to do that.
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Excerpt from field report A2469-1:
Regarding historical origins/culture of human settlement on P4X-997
Dr. Daniel Jackson, special assignment SG-1
This section is one iteration past my research notes, gussied up to sound Daniel-esque. More on the excerpt format later.
I know no Chinese grammar, and can hardly say anything in the language. Actually the extent of my knowledge comes from this kid's learning book that my former office-mate brought me back from China (it's called "Zi Li Shi Zi" -- loosely meaning "learn characters from the picture principles"), a beginner's Chinese dictionary that taught me how to look up characters so I could decipher said kid's book, and later and Oxford Chinese-English dictionary and a lot of poking around on zhongwen.com, looking for cool Chinese phrases and links. I should credit that site as a co-author.
山谷安---(little .jpg's I made from image captures on zhongwen.com. On the upside, it should work for any browser. On the downside, it looks icky on a blue background. ETA, and I have recently turned it into Chinese font characters since my jpg's got moved.)
shān-gǔ ān: From the Mandarin meaning "peaceful valley" [probably?](shān-gǔ - 'mountain gorge,' valley [true]; ān - pictorially a woman under a roof, tranquility)[true]. However, an alternate meaning of the second syllable is the surname yù[true], confirmed by the inhabitants as an ancient term for Emperor or God [made-up], and consistent with texts discovered in on both P29-366 and P4X-598 as referencing the Goa'uld Yu [made-up]. As is typically seen in civilizations conquered by Yu, the interpretation of the character ān is both utmost tranquility and utmost indenture - a traditional indication of a human who has given themselves up as a Goa’uld host[obviously made-up]. Thus the meaning of the name is both the direct, simple "shāngǔ ān" and the symbolic "Shān Yù Ān," loosely translated as "in service to the mountain lord." [even I thought that was cool when I figured it out]
Playing a bit fast and loose with the Chinese symbols here. It's probably pushing it to say that the Goa'uld Emperor Yu would be associated with the character 谷 (yù), in reference to a gorge or valley, even given it's a surname of a kind. I'm pretty sure Yu in SG1 is 于 (yú, breath?), which is actually a rising tone-- I think I've actually seen that symbol in the show, maybe in the summit episode? But it could also be 玉 (yù, jade).
This etymology, along with several of the cultural myths (see next section) supports the conclusion that P4X-997 was once a "host nursery" for Yu and his descendants. This leads to the speculation that the practice and ability of zhēgài miàn (hidden face) evolved as a defense mechanism to counteract Yu’s oppression, and ultimately led to the abandonment of the colony and to the intolerance for zhēn miànmù.
遮蓋面 (zhēgài miàn), "hidden face" in my rudimentary translation, though I think "face" is perhaps a bit abstracted in that context because it's just the single character-- 面 could also mean eg, "aspect" or "surface"
Very hastily summarized, here, that it was Yu's selection of "normal" people as hosts that gave the mutation a foothold and room to flourish. Since Yu wouldn't pick the strange ones, their genes were the ones that were passed on in the new generation. Culturally, the true face, or showing it at least, becomes associated with dangerous, excessive pride leading to a fall-- being taken away as a host in the concrete sense, but the origin has probably been lost. That's the idea, anyway.
Although the characters in the name have remained unchanged through the civilization’s history, pronunciation has evolved from the original three syllables with the stress on the second syllable, lengthened third tone (gǔ) into the shortened "shān-guān," which may be understood simply as "mountain pass" in spoken Mandarin [made up the word but the translation is true] (eg. Shānhǎi guān -- eastern terminus of the Great Wall of China [true]). Whether this is a deliberate attempt by the society to further eschew the influence of Lord Yu, or merely an effect of limitations in speech due to the progression of physical abnormalities is unclear.[more non-linear foreshadowing]
It took me a while to figure out a name for P4X-997. I was tossing around a few things until I came across 山海關(Shānhǎi guān) in my zhongwen searches. And I don't know a ton of characters offhand but I did know 安 (ān), and that pieced the name together for me from the word for valley, with "tranquility" tacked onto the end. And when I found out that "gǔ" could also be pronounced as "yù" for a surname, I was like, Dude! Score!
So I apparently had a lot to say here, but this little section has to do an awful lot in terms of setting up the background of the culture. If I'd been writing it novel-style this might take up several pages. It's also the closest to a Daniel POV that the story gets. I still have a really tough time getting into Daniel's head.
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"Daniel, what’s going on?" Jack murmured, scanning the small group of natives. [scanning-- another word that should go on my list]
"I don’t know," Daniel murmured back.
Ten people [at first I'd said "several", then figured that being a military guy, Jack would count them] had gathered at the pathway near the rock face. They had been smiling, Jack thought, until his team turned around. But it was kind of hard to tell, because it was like staring at a crowd of puppets. Puppets that were moving and talking on their own, and seemingly getting more and more agitated. Women, men, children, all with dark hair set atop overly large, strange faces with deep-set eyes and small mouths.
"Articulated masks--" Carter ventured.
Every single one of the villagers was wearing a different mask. Each one looked custom molded. Some were long, some wide, some painted in red and black. Some had texture carved into the cheekbones or forehead. All of them looked disjointed at the jawline - the chin pieces moved freely as the crowd murmured.
It's kind of hard for me to pin down exactly what the villagers look like, beyond what I describe here, which is actually pretty vague (readers, fill in the blanks, right?). It makes me wonder if the story would be ill-served in a visual medium, without enough time to acclimate to the strangeness of the characters and no way to gloss over it or only semi-visualize it, it might distract from empathizing with them. For example, I can visualize Shen Luo as rather doll-like, still, but I get visually vague on how the mechanics of her movement work.
It's not that the masks were ugly. They were human features, just accentuated and - Jack kept falling back on the word strange. He was used to strange encounters, but this was the first time he had been completely unnerved by the look of something. He frowned, trying to keep an eye on the natives without - keeping an eye on the natives. Carter eyed him warily, and Teal’c subtly strengthened his grip on his staff weapon. The crowd backed away in strange, stilted movements, murmuring. One phrase stood out.
"What the hell is 'jun myan-moo?'" Jack asked, trying to stay still and unthreatening.
"Mandarin," Daniel said. "Face. Something to do with face."
At the back of the group, a child suddenly shrieked and bolted. A woman set after him with a cry, "Xiǎohuà!", and the rest of the crowd scattered like a burst dam [Hey! A similie! I think this may be the only one.]. In moments the small group had disappeared back toward a string of red houses peeking through the vines.
小華(Xiǎohuà): a boy's name. In my kid's book, we ate apples with our friends, saving one for when Xiǎohuà came by. Also the name of a former student in my department.
Jack stood with his team in the resulting silence, only slightly dumbfounded.
"That went well," he said.
"Zhēn miànmù," Daniel exclaimed. "True face. Maybe it's some kind of welcoming ceremony."
About now, I'm glad Daniel's a genius. Because it occurs to me that gaining the jist of spoken Mandarin from hearing random snatches in a crowd is not easy. The number of syllables is small, and meaning depends on both the sound (with tones) and on the character associated with it. I'd ask my Chinese friends about a name like Feng or Jiang, what it meant, and they'd say, "I'd have to see it written down." I guess that's why you get a single syllable-pictogram that conveys a meaning, (like 面 for face), but the formal word for that meaning often is 2 syllables together.
For example, I took 真面目 (zhēn miànmù) as a shortened version of the phrase 真正面目 (zhēnzhēng miànmù) meaning "true face", where face (面目) comes from the physical idea of a face (the pictogram is actually a human face), but it's acutally a more abstracted meaning of face, like "countenance". 目 is "eye", so perhaps 面目 is more like a "look" (in the quasi-Zoolander sense). And if you look up 真(zhēn) you see it means "real" or "true", but the *word* meaning real or true is 真正 (zhēnzhēng). Otherwise, there's about 8 different characters pronounced "zhēn" (yes, even with the tone) that all mean totally different things. But I suppose if Daniel were familiar with the original phrase or the meanings of all of the different characters, he'd be able to pick out which "zhēn" the villagers meant.
I reiterate. Daniel = Genius. Thank God.
"That," Jack indicated the scene with a wave of his hand, "wasn't very welcoming."
Daniel shrugged, looking around. "I guess we're underdressed."
"Daniel," Carter said, "Those people weren't affronted. They were afraid."
A rustle of movement had Teal'c spinning to his left, ready to bring his staff weapon to bear.
"Lǎowài, lǎowài!" It was the same feminine voice they had first heard. It came from a young woman hovering at the side of the path, her face dressed in the same kind of strange mask they had seen in the crowd. Hers was colored off-white, with three raised, red characters adorning the cheekbones and high forehead. She wore a simple gray dress. Her dark hair was pulled back in a high bun, her dark eyes were small but bright in the shadow of the mask.
"Shanguan welcomes you, honored foreigners..." she said as she stepped tentatively forward.
Daniel came forward to meet her. She put a hand to his face, awed.
"You have the zhēn miànmù," she said. "So like--" she stopped, suddenly nervous. Her cheeks flushed, her brow knitted.
It's hard for me to judge how obvious/non-obvious the clues are about what Shen Luo is hiding. But this is a clue that she's at least hiding something.
Jack blinked back surprise. Daniel took the woman's hand in his own.
"Oh my god--" Daniel said.
Jack finished the thought. "It’s not a mask."
I do like that as an ending for this section. In my notes this section was called "discovery"
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Supplement to field report A2469-13:
Regarding physiology of human settlement on P4X-997 Incidentally, when picking random planet designations, I consciously try to use repeated digits, just in case no one else is doing so. [/statnerd]
Doctor Janet Fraiser, chief medical officer
The existence of maxillofacial bone tumors is evident in human cultures around the earth, from mild cases of bumps and nodules to extreme cases where the tumors grow unchecked and absorb the bone structure of the face. Some variants, such as craniofacial "cherubism" (Eppley, 1972) [real reference] are caused by genetic factors. Such tumors are rare and disfiguring. Surgical solutions involve carving new facial features from the tumor itself. Ossification and rapid growth can also occur in soft tissues of the body, either as a result of a genetic disease like FOP (Coakley, 1957)[made-up reference, but FOP is real], a past trauma, or a progressive non-genetic defect like Proteus syndrome (Cohen and Hayden, 1979)[real reference].
There was a time when I watched waaaaay too much Discovery Health Channel. But I did accrue a knowledge of weird diseases, one of such being Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva, in which muscle and soft tissue actually slowly turn to bone, eventually locking a person into one unmoving position. Proteus syndrome, on the other hand, is (I think) what they think the Elephant Man had-- it causes rapid growth of bone tumors and disfigurement. Rather awful conditions. 'Course, I was scouring the internet for at least an hour looking for a journal reference on FOP before I realized, idiot, I could just make one up.
These syndromes influenced my construction of the Shanguan mutation, but I haven't really got a hugely concrete, fixed picture in my head of what the people look like. As I was writing, I imagined a condition wherein bone growth can enlarge the face, "masking" it, but still from under the skin. At the same time, the bone growth would extend into soft tissues too, kind of thinning the skin out more so than the usual way the maxillofacial bone tumors work (which btw, is horrifying), and somewhat more delicately. People can still make facial expressions, if a bit less malleable than normal faces. Faces are further adorned by tattoos and colors. The look would be a cross between human features with human motions, and a more stilted, kind of articulated puppetry, but subtle, like they were Geisha inspired or taken from old oriental artwork. Ack, okay, if I think too hard about it, it freaks me out.
In no documented case can a human being willfully control the growth or shape of new bone structures, facial or otherwise. If the inhabitants of P4X-997 have developed such an ability, as the evidence from SG-1's encounter suggests, it is certainly worthy of further study. The benefits to orthopedic and oncology research alone would certainly fall within ethical boundaries of the technology and justify the risks.
In other words, Janet agrees with Daniel ;P
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About the excerpt format: really, there's a novel hiding in this story. Or a script. And I'm not a novelist, nor a scriptwriter, and I'm especially not a "write it in 4 weeks" novelist or scriptwriter. With creative writing, the less I have to physically write, the better. I had to pick my battles with this story. I started out approaching it from a script-like or novel perspective. Linear time, scene changes, dialogue, action, etc. And there was so much I wanted to cover-- about Shen Luo and her history, about the culture of the planet, the nature of the mutation, about the priests and the conditioning practice, about the escape from the planet or the recovery period for Sam and Daniel-- you get the idea; it would have been impossible for me to write it as a linear adventure story. I was looking at something that could easily grow to 50,000 words. And the last (and only) time I wrote something that long, it took me 3 years to finish it. So, how to condense it?
Then, one day as I was staring at my language notes on my computer screen, it hit me: what about just putting the exposition in, in a report format? It saved me so much time and space (and sanity), and it solidified a short-story structure for me as a back-and-forth type of retroactive storytelling. In each section, I could tie the ideas together from present to past. From "Shanguan welcomes you" to the description of the name and the society. From the discovery scene to Dr. Fraiser's clinical assessment, from introduction of the senyan priests to Sam dealing with the effects of their ministrations, etc. So in essence it's a cheat, but a necessary one for me. I think if Veil was written as a novel it would probably gain some cool things, but lose some things too.
On to Part 2
Link to the original story: Veil
Title: Veil
Author: Eve11
Rating: G
Written for: Tripoli
Summary: shān-gǔ ān: From the Mandarin meaning "peaceful valley" (shān-gǔ - 'mountain gorge,' valley; ān - pictorially a woman under a roof, tranquility).
Notes: Thanks for such an interesting challenge! Hope you like what I’ve done with the place. This story takes place late season 5 (between "The Warrior" and "Menace.") No spoilers, all language mistakes (and general other mistakes) are my own. Many thanks to auntiemeesh, wishkey, and fbf for all their helpful comments. fbf, you were right on point six, and I bow to your superior beta-ing wisdom. More on point 6 later...
This story was written for the 2005 Stargate Team Ficathon. The email exchange for the ficathon went like this:
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nanda: You will be writing for: Tripoli (LJ: tripoli8) Who wants: Offworld, secret societies, the Uncanny Valley. (alternately, if you wrote me original-team Moebius fic, I would be yours forever). (Uncanny Valley at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley)
And doesn't want: Nothing in particular, and don't feel obliged to fill the above requests.
me: Got it. Thanks! An apropos assignment for a cmu email address :)
nanda: Oh, thank god you didn't panic! We were a little worried about Tripoli and her robots. :) Have fun writing!
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So, yeah, this was practically my first Stargate piece, and right out of the gate I was writing for the author of Mnemophobia and The Cost of Doing Business which were both brilliant... So, I was not exactly intimidated, but it was more like, "I'd better come up with something good!"
Five weeks in, I had one or two scenes of a completely different story (still unfinished) that would have been very Octavia Butler-esque had I managed to finish it, but it was too involved. With four weeks to go, I changed direction and went back to one of my other ideas-- a vague notion of masks, body alterations, creepy puppets and Asian culture. I added the idea, "what would the society be like who actually lived IN the Uncanny Valley, and what would it do to someone from the normal space if that valley were suddenly inverted?". Which eventually produced Veil, by far the longest story I'd completed in several years.
For those who would like it, here is a quick Mandarin pronunciation guide for the story. Some of the accented text is written in unicode and may have problems switching between browsers. Sorry in advance.
ETA: (6/5/06): Updated to final version with some minor changes.
Oh, you have NO IDEA how many obsessive tweaks I did to this in those 6 months-- a word here, a phrase there...actually I could probably dig up the older version and diff it and show all the changes... but I'll spare you. On to the story:
Veil --The homophone to "Vale" is deliberate here; I liked it as a title because of that and the added benefit of a direct connotation to hidden or shrouded things.
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**************
"It's amazing, really." Daniel sits forward in the small chair, tapping a finger on his thigh. His eyes travel the VIP room walls, neatly avoiding the door and the chair in the corner where Jack has tried to make himself as unobtrusive as possible.
I think this works okay as an openening paragraph. The dialogue is so-so but the POV description hopefully catches the reader's attention and sets up some questions (that of course doesn't get answered in the entirety until ten sections later)
"What's that?" Jack shifts in his chair. Daniel reacts to the movement, looking at Jack for the barest second before retreating back over to the bed to sit facing the wall, fingers worrying the blue fabric bedspread.
Watching Daniel this jittery makes Jack's jaw ache and his hands clench into fists. No sudden movement. No loud noise. Forget the fact he wants to explode out of this chair, grab the archaeologist by the shoulders and look him straight in the eye with a healthy dose of "Snap out of it!"
Jack lets out a slow breath. It’s only been two days. Really, Daniel is doing well, considering. Jack runs a hand through his hair and repeats his question.
"What's amazing?"
"The planet really was beautiful. We didn’t have time to take it in, to appreciate it."
Leave it to Daniel. Unbelievable.
Yeah, I'm with Jack here. But I like that despite the fact he can hardly deal with being in the same room as someone else, despite everything that happened (and I really want people to be on the edges of their seats, like "OMG what happened!?") Daniel is still an advocate for helping those that need to be helped.
"Who says I missed anything?" Jack says. "Flowers, cliffs, temples. Pretty planet--"
"Worth a second chance."
"--full of ugly, crazy people."
heh, Jack is too much fun to write.
Daniel eyes the ceiling. "If we explain to them about the Goa'uld--"
"No way. See, that would involve going back."
"Jack--"
"Can't do it. I hit my pagoda quota last time."
That earns an exasperated sigh. "What about Shen Luo?"
"What about her?"
"You don’t think we should help her?"
The grade A petulance is maddeningly normal, and it’s pissing him off. Before Jack can stop himself he’s rising up out of the chair and his voice is rising to match.
"Like she helped us? Forget it! Let'em--"
"Jack, would you just lay off!" Daniel's outburst halts Jack mid-step. He shuts his mouth and sits down, but Daniel is already in the corner, looking like he wants to climb the walls. God, his heart must be beating out of his chest.
Originally, Jack was taken to task by Doctor Fraiser, but it was an observation room then, and fbf was like, "what? how did that happen?" and then I realized it should really just be restructured to Jack and Daniel alone.
"Sorry," Jack says. "Sorry, Daniel, it's just me."
"Oh, I know." Daniel rubs at his eyes, looking wired and exhausted. "It's just I can't -- God, Jack, this is driving me nuts."
You and me both. "Give it a few more days. Doc says it's wearing off. You want me to scram?"
The italic thoughts on this part still bug me-- actually this whole section is a little rough, and there should be some more description there, instead of relying on "thought-quotes". I do like the dialogue, though.
Daniel nods. But as Jack heads for the door Daniel adds a quiet "Wait."
He turns around, his gaze meeting red-rimmed blue eyes. Daniel fidgets but keeps eye contact long enough to ask a simple question.
"How is Sam?"
Jack looks down at his hands. "As good as to be expected. They gave her something for the pain but she's still..." he waves an all-encompassing hand at Daniel, who flinches away, looking miserable. "You know."
This scene was labeled "Jack and Daniel 1" in my list of things I had to write. This was the first scene I wrote, and I wasn't actually planning for it to come first, but then after I restructured the story from more of an unattainable novel-length thing to a short story, it just kind of belonged here. I didn't realize when I originally wrote the story how much of a tension builder this first part was, but I think from the feedback I got that it did a good job setting things up non-linearly.
******************
Verb tense switch-- past tense for past, present tense for present. I'm not sure if I'd do it again that way if I were to re-write this. But originally I'd had some title like "Four days earlier" or some such, which was somewhat glaring and then became superfluous (according to one of my betas) with the tense switch.
"What is that, maybe three hundred feet?" Jack asked. This was the first time any of them had emerged from a Stargate that was fused this high into the side of a cliff [yes, they've walked out of gates fused into cliffs (New Ground), just not *this high*... my betas love me, they really do ;)], and he had to admit, it was damn impressive at first glance. If not slightly vertigo-inducing, what with the rather small ledge and rather large drop.
In terms of mountains, 300 feet isn't bad, but for being stuck on the side of a cliff and having to walk down a rickety stairway? 300 feet is *high*
Carter peered over the edge, nodding an affirmative. "Looks like it. Wow, what a view."
"Good thing we didn't get a running start," Daniel added, adjusting his pack. "They really didn't leave much room for error."
Jack looked around. The only way off the ledge was a narrow staircase chipped into the rock. "Not very practical, either," he said.
"It is a ksang'ai," Teal'c said [I love making up words!], surveying the rock face. "But it appears to be in disrepair."
Jack turned around, mindful of the drop. "A what?"
"A ceremonial gate, meant to instill awe upon the populace as their God arrives." Teal'c surveyed the terrain again. "This one has most likely been abandoned for many centuries." I think if I gathered up all my stories and did word distributions, the word "surveyed" would show up way too often. There are several others I have to watch out for. I should really write down a list.
Daniel turned. "Instilling awe? And that's different from the usual chappa'ai how?"
"The ksang'ai is accessed from the gate in an orbiting vessel, to which it is linked," Teal'c explained. "The system lord would not use it for Jaffa deployment or travel, but as part of the mythos of the subjugated culture."
"That would explain the problems Command had pinpointing its signature," Carter said. "It was almost like tracking two intertwining signals. We had to extrapolate and uncouple the naquadah feeds, and this was the only one that would lock." The key to technospeak: be as vague as humanly possible, but use specific-sounding words. Or do what Farscape does, and just cut away to a different scene, then come back when everything is explained. I like that one.
"So, it's for show?" Jack asked. "Like the good china in the dining room hutch?"
"Indeed, O'Neill. It allows for a certain -- decadence, in the construction."
"Decadence . . ." Daniel said, trailing off and staring at the rock face. "Is an understatement."
The rest of the team followed Daniel's gaze. It took a few moments for Jack to realize what they were looking at. The lines and crags in the cliff face were definitely not random. It was hard to judge the details from this angle, but something stretched away in all directions, carved into the entire side of the mountain.
Carter dropped her gear. "Holy cow. What is that?"
"Extreme makeover, Goa'uld edition," Jack said. "Let's get down."
Slightly anachronistic because Extreme Makeover: Home Edition was a few seasons away from season 5 SG1. *whistles* I didn't want to lose that line, though. Hopefully no one would have noticed had I not decided to point it out to you. It's ultimately a serious story but I think it's a good thing to try and put humor in when you can.
They descended in single file down to the valley below. The staircase was treacherous and narrow, worn down on the edges and crumbling in places. But the planet itself wasn't abandoned. Daniel pointed out wisps of smoke curling up through the forest canopy, and a few hints of red pointed roofs.
At the bottom of the stair they exited to a small clearing-- a verdant collection of trees, flowered vines, moss and slate paths, worn but well tended. The trees were close enough to shade the sun but the leaves were high and the trunks spread out, more like a garden than a forest. The land was criss-crossed with several meandering brooks.
"Do we know which system lord we're dealing with?" Carter asked, looking around.
"I’ve got a pretty good idea," Daniel said [I can totally hear Daniel saying that]. The archaeologist had turned around to study the cliff face through the trees, and now Jack, Sam and Teal’c came to his side to look. From this vantage point, the gashes in the cliff came together into a massive mural. The staircase they had just painstakingly descended was camouflaged into one of a series of bold, sweeping strokes radiating out from the center of the cliff. The gate itself was intertwined seamlessly into a pattern of circles tiled lightly across the rock. But all of those designs and marks took backstage to a single, gigantic symbol taking up the entire height of the cliff:
谷
Jack squinted. "Lord Stick House?"
Daniel sighed. "Lord Yu."
It really does look like a house with some sticks coming off of it, doesn't it? Overall, I'm not sure where the idea of the cliff came from -- my road map was much more plot-milestone and theme-driven and in these early sections I just kind of let my brain wander on the page and went with it.
"Lǎowài," came a small feminine voice behind them. "Shanguan welcomes you."
老外 (lǎowài), foreigner, honorific.
This is another early written section, just setting things up. I got a lot of comments noting that this was a very visual piece, but when I look back at it, word for word, there must be a lot coming from a few smaller sections and paragraphs. I don't tend toward metaphors or things like that. I read one article on visualization in short story writing that said the best thing to do is focus on a few key details and let the reader fill in the gaps. So I try to do that.
******************
Excerpt from field report A2469-1:
Regarding historical origins/culture of human settlement on P4X-997
Dr. Daniel Jackson, special assignment SG-1
This section is one iteration past my research notes, gussied up to sound Daniel-esque. More on the excerpt format later.
I know no Chinese grammar, and can hardly say anything in the language. Actually the extent of my knowledge comes from this kid's learning book that my former office-mate brought me back from China (it's called "Zi Li Shi Zi" -- loosely meaning "learn characters from the picture principles"), a beginner's Chinese dictionary that taught me how to look up characters so I could decipher said kid's book, and later and Oxford Chinese-English dictionary and a lot of poking around on zhongwen.com, looking for cool Chinese phrases and links. I should credit that site as a co-author.
山谷安---(little .jpg's I made from image captures on zhongwen.com. On the upside, it should work for any browser. On the downside, it looks icky on a blue background. ETA, and I have recently turned it into Chinese font characters since my jpg's got moved.)
shān-gǔ ān: From the Mandarin meaning "peaceful valley" [probably?](shān-gǔ - 'mountain gorge,' valley [true]; ān - pictorially a woman under a roof, tranquility)[true]. However, an alternate meaning of the second syllable is the surname yù[true], confirmed by the inhabitants as an ancient term for Emperor or God [made-up], and consistent with texts discovered in on both P29-366 and P4X-598 as referencing the Goa'uld Yu [made-up]. As is typically seen in civilizations conquered by Yu, the interpretation of the character ān is both utmost tranquility and utmost indenture - a traditional indication of a human who has given themselves up as a Goa’uld host[obviously made-up]. Thus the meaning of the name is both the direct, simple "shāngǔ ān" and the symbolic "Shān Yù Ān," loosely translated as "in service to the mountain lord." [even I thought that was cool when I figured it out]
Playing a bit fast and loose with the Chinese symbols here. It's probably pushing it to say that the Goa'uld Emperor Yu would be associated with the character 谷 (yù), in reference to a gorge or valley, even given it's a surname of a kind. I'm pretty sure Yu in SG1 is 于 (yú, breath?), which is actually a rising tone-- I think I've actually seen that symbol in the show, maybe in the summit episode? But it could also be 玉 (yù, jade).
This etymology, along with several of the cultural myths (see next section) supports the conclusion that P4X-997 was once a "host nursery" for Yu and his descendants. This leads to the speculation that the practice and ability of zhēgài miàn (hidden face) evolved as a defense mechanism to counteract Yu’s oppression, and ultimately led to the abandonment of the colony and to the intolerance for zhēn miànmù.
遮蓋面 (zhēgài miàn), "hidden face" in my rudimentary translation, though I think "face" is perhaps a bit abstracted in that context because it's just the single character-- 面 could also mean eg, "aspect" or "surface"
Very hastily summarized, here, that it was Yu's selection of "normal" people as hosts that gave the mutation a foothold and room to flourish. Since Yu wouldn't pick the strange ones, their genes were the ones that were passed on in the new generation. Culturally, the true face, or showing it at least, becomes associated with dangerous, excessive pride leading to a fall-- being taken away as a host in the concrete sense, but the origin has probably been lost. That's the idea, anyway.
Although the characters in the name have remained unchanged through the civilization’s history, pronunciation has evolved from the original three syllables with the stress on the second syllable, lengthened third tone (gǔ) into the shortened "shān-guān," which may be understood simply as "mountain pass" in spoken Mandarin [made up the word but the translation is true] (eg. Shānhǎi guān -- eastern terminus of the Great Wall of China [true]). Whether this is a deliberate attempt by the society to further eschew the influence of Lord Yu, or merely an effect of limitations in speech due to the progression of physical abnormalities is unclear.[more non-linear foreshadowing]
It took me a while to figure out a name for P4X-997. I was tossing around a few things until I came across 山海關(Shānhǎi guān) in my zhongwen searches. And I don't know a ton of characters offhand but I did know 安 (ān), and that pieced the name together for me from the word for valley, with "tranquility" tacked onto the end. And when I found out that "gǔ" could also be pronounced as "yù" for a surname, I was like, Dude! Score!
So I apparently had a lot to say here, but this little section has to do an awful lot in terms of setting up the background of the culture. If I'd been writing it novel-style this might take up several pages. It's also the closest to a Daniel POV that the story gets. I still have a really tough time getting into Daniel's head.
******************
"Daniel, what’s going on?" Jack murmured, scanning the small group of natives. [scanning-- another word that should go on my list]
"I don’t know," Daniel murmured back.
Ten people [at first I'd said "several", then figured that being a military guy, Jack would count them] had gathered at the pathway near the rock face. They had been smiling, Jack thought, until his team turned around. But it was kind of hard to tell, because it was like staring at a crowd of puppets. Puppets that were moving and talking on their own, and seemingly getting more and more agitated. Women, men, children, all with dark hair set atop overly large, strange faces with deep-set eyes and small mouths.
"Articulated masks--" Carter ventured.
Every single one of the villagers was wearing a different mask. Each one looked custom molded. Some were long, some wide, some painted in red and black. Some had texture carved into the cheekbones or forehead. All of them looked disjointed at the jawline - the chin pieces moved freely as the crowd murmured.
It's kind of hard for me to pin down exactly what the villagers look like, beyond what I describe here, which is actually pretty vague (readers, fill in the blanks, right?). It makes me wonder if the story would be ill-served in a visual medium, without enough time to acclimate to the strangeness of the characters and no way to gloss over it or only semi-visualize it, it might distract from empathizing with them. For example, I can visualize Shen Luo as rather doll-like, still, but I get visually vague on how the mechanics of her movement work.
It's not that the masks were ugly. They were human features, just accentuated and - Jack kept falling back on the word strange. He was used to strange encounters, but this was the first time he had been completely unnerved by the look of something. He frowned, trying to keep an eye on the natives without - keeping an eye on the natives. Carter eyed him warily, and Teal’c subtly strengthened his grip on his staff weapon. The crowd backed away in strange, stilted movements, murmuring. One phrase stood out.
"What the hell is 'jun myan-moo?'" Jack asked, trying to stay still and unthreatening.
"Mandarin," Daniel said. "Face. Something to do with face."
At the back of the group, a child suddenly shrieked and bolted. A woman set after him with a cry, "Xiǎohuà!", and the rest of the crowd scattered like a burst dam [Hey! A similie! I think this may be the only one.]. In moments the small group had disappeared back toward a string of red houses peeking through the vines.
小華(Xiǎohuà): a boy's name. In my kid's book, we ate apples with our friends, saving one for when Xiǎohuà came by. Also the name of a former student in my department.
Jack stood with his team in the resulting silence, only slightly dumbfounded.
"That went well," he said.
"Zhēn miànmù," Daniel exclaimed. "True face. Maybe it's some kind of welcoming ceremony."
About now, I'm glad Daniel's a genius. Because it occurs to me that gaining the jist of spoken Mandarin from hearing random snatches in a crowd is not easy. The number of syllables is small, and meaning depends on both the sound (with tones) and on the character associated with it. I'd ask my Chinese friends about a name like Feng or Jiang, what it meant, and they'd say, "I'd have to see it written down." I guess that's why you get a single syllable-pictogram that conveys a meaning, (like 面 for face), but the formal word for that meaning often is 2 syllables together.
For example, I took 真面目 (zhēn miànmù) as a shortened version of the phrase 真正面目 (zhēnzhēng miànmù) meaning "true face", where face (面目) comes from the physical idea of a face (the pictogram is actually a human face), but it's acutally a more abstracted meaning of face, like "countenance". 目 is "eye", so perhaps 面目 is more like a "look" (in the quasi-Zoolander sense). And if you look up 真(zhēn) you see it means "real" or "true", but the *word* meaning real or true is 真正 (zhēnzhēng). Otherwise, there's about 8 different characters pronounced "zhēn" (yes, even with the tone) that all mean totally different things. But I suppose if Daniel were familiar with the original phrase or the meanings of all of the different characters, he'd be able to pick out which "zhēn" the villagers meant.
I reiterate. Daniel = Genius. Thank God.
"That," Jack indicated the scene with a wave of his hand, "wasn't very welcoming."
Daniel shrugged, looking around. "I guess we're underdressed."
"Daniel," Carter said, "Those people weren't affronted. They were afraid."
A rustle of movement had Teal'c spinning to his left, ready to bring his staff weapon to bear.
"Lǎowài, lǎowài!" It was the same feminine voice they had first heard. It came from a young woman hovering at the side of the path, her face dressed in the same kind of strange mask they had seen in the crowd. Hers was colored off-white, with three raised, red characters adorning the cheekbones and high forehead. She wore a simple gray dress. Her dark hair was pulled back in a high bun, her dark eyes were small but bright in the shadow of the mask.
"Shanguan welcomes you, honored foreigners..." she said as she stepped tentatively forward.
Daniel came forward to meet her. She put a hand to his face, awed.
"You have the zhēn miànmù," she said. "So like--" she stopped, suddenly nervous. Her cheeks flushed, her brow knitted.
It's hard for me to judge how obvious/non-obvious the clues are about what Shen Luo is hiding. But this is a clue that she's at least hiding something.
Jack blinked back surprise. Daniel took the woman's hand in his own.
"Oh my god--" Daniel said.
Jack finished the thought. "It’s not a mask."
I do like that as an ending for this section. In my notes this section was called "discovery"
******************
Supplement to field report A2469-13:
Regarding physiology of human settlement on P4X-997 Incidentally, when picking random planet designations, I consciously try to use repeated digits, just in case no one else is doing so. [/statnerd]
Doctor Janet Fraiser, chief medical officer
The existence of maxillofacial bone tumors is evident in human cultures around the earth, from mild cases of bumps and nodules to extreme cases where the tumors grow unchecked and absorb the bone structure of the face. Some variants, such as craniofacial "cherubism" (Eppley, 1972) [real reference] are caused by genetic factors. Such tumors are rare and disfiguring. Surgical solutions involve carving new facial features from the tumor itself. Ossification and rapid growth can also occur in soft tissues of the body, either as a result of a genetic disease like FOP (Coakley, 1957)[made-up reference, but FOP is real], a past trauma, or a progressive non-genetic defect like Proteus syndrome (Cohen and Hayden, 1979)[real reference].
There was a time when I watched waaaaay too much Discovery Health Channel. But I did accrue a knowledge of weird diseases, one of such being Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva, in which muscle and soft tissue actually slowly turn to bone, eventually locking a person into one unmoving position. Proteus syndrome, on the other hand, is (I think) what they think the Elephant Man had-- it causes rapid growth of bone tumors and disfigurement. Rather awful conditions. 'Course, I was scouring the internet for at least an hour looking for a journal reference on FOP before I realized, idiot, I could just make one up.
These syndromes influenced my construction of the Shanguan mutation, but I haven't really got a hugely concrete, fixed picture in my head of what the people look like. As I was writing, I imagined a condition wherein bone growth can enlarge the face, "masking" it, but still from under the skin. At the same time, the bone growth would extend into soft tissues too, kind of thinning the skin out more so than the usual way the maxillofacial bone tumors work (which btw, is horrifying), and somewhat more delicately. People can still make facial expressions, if a bit less malleable than normal faces. Faces are further adorned by tattoos and colors. The look would be a cross between human features with human motions, and a more stilted, kind of articulated puppetry, but subtle, like they were Geisha inspired or taken from old oriental artwork. Ack, okay, if I think too hard about it, it freaks me out.
In no documented case can a human being willfully control the growth or shape of new bone structures, facial or otherwise. If the inhabitants of P4X-997 have developed such an ability, as the evidence from SG-1's encounter suggests, it is certainly worthy of further study. The benefits to orthopedic and oncology research alone would certainly fall within ethical boundaries of the technology and justify the risks.
In other words, Janet agrees with Daniel ;P
********
About the excerpt format: really, there's a novel hiding in this story. Or a script. And I'm not a novelist, nor a scriptwriter, and I'm especially not a "write it in 4 weeks" novelist or scriptwriter. With creative writing, the less I have to physically write, the better. I had to pick my battles with this story. I started out approaching it from a script-like or novel perspective. Linear time, scene changes, dialogue, action, etc. And there was so much I wanted to cover-- about Shen Luo and her history, about the culture of the planet, the nature of the mutation, about the priests and the conditioning practice, about the escape from the planet or the recovery period for Sam and Daniel-- you get the idea; it would have been impossible for me to write it as a linear adventure story. I was looking at something that could easily grow to 50,000 words. And the last (and only) time I wrote something that long, it took me 3 years to finish it. So, how to condense it?
Then, one day as I was staring at my language notes on my computer screen, it hit me: what about just putting the exposition in, in a report format? It saved me so much time and space (and sanity), and it solidified a short-story structure for me as a back-and-forth type of retroactive storytelling. In each section, I could tie the ideas together from present to past. From "Shanguan welcomes you" to the description of the name and the society. From the discovery scene to Dr. Fraiser's clinical assessment, from introduction of the senyan priests to Sam dealing with the effects of their ministrations, etc. So in essence it's a cheat, but a necessary one for me. I think if Veil was written as a novel it would probably gain some cool things, but lose some things too.
On to Part 2