Ich Schenk' Dir Die Welt 5/13
Previous | Master Post
Interlude
How to Entertain Your Heterodyne
Give her something to study.
“Oh, good morning, Krosp,” said Woolsey. “Where’s Lady Heterodyne?”
“Hologram room,” Krosp replied between bites of bacon-cheese omelet. “She will probably be there for a few hours yet.”
Woolsey blinked. “A few hours? The hologram’s presentation doesn’t run that long. Is she trying to memorize it?”
“No, but she probably will have by the time she has figured out how it works.”
“Oh, dear.” Woolsey touched his radio. “Dr. Zelenka, would you mind stopping by the hologram room to make sure Lady Heterodyne hasn’t dismantled it?”
Krosp didn’t need to know Czech to understand Zelenka’s response. He decided not to tell anyone that Violetta had confiscated all of Agatha’s tools and ensured that she’d gone in with only a pencil and notepad. When the Spark was on her, Agatha could cause all kinds of havoc with her bare hands.
All the same, it was something of a relief when the only topic about which Agatha and Zelenka were arguing in heated Russian when they walked into the mess hall ten minutes later was the definition of “unaccompanied.” Ah, well, at least these television gadgets looked simple enough not to provide much of a distraction from the content of Daniel Jackson’s instructional videos, which were next on the day’s agenda.
Take her offworld for trading missions.
“And then,” Agatha continued explaining the machine she’d just made as a bartering chip, “if you are stitching something really bulky, or if you are hired to quilt a blanket under time constraints or some such, you can use this lever”-she demonstrated-“to extend the arm and table and make it easier to reach the center.”
The seamstress had tears in her eyes. “How can I ever hope to afford such a marvel? The time it will save... the trade it will bring....”
“Well, I hardly want to take all your fabric or anything like that. Perhaps we could arrange credit with other merchants as well?”
When the group returned to the Gate five hours later, Ronon found himself hauling twice the amount of seed they’d been sent to acquire and a sack of beans that had looked interesting, while Violetta carried five large blank books Agatha planned to use for note-taking and Agatha herself carried enough fabric and sewing stuff to make clothes for both girls for a month and a dress for the Lucrezia clone to wear when the time came. Both girls were in standard Atlantis offworld uniforms for this trip, but no one had objected when they’d said they might prefer something closer to what they’d worn back home for everyday wear. At least if Agatha was sewing, she wasn’t building Replicators.
Ronon didn’t tell Agatha he had the sewing machine’s death ray attachment in his pocket. She probably already knew and didn’t care anyway.
Train her to fight.
A run through the city at dawn with John and Ronon. Bantos at 8 with Teyla, followed by sword practice with Ronon. Kickboxing with Amelia on Tuesdays. PT with Maj. Anne Teldy’s team on Wednesdays. Target practice every Thursday afternoon with Maj. Evan Lorne.
“I’m never going to have time to get any work done!” Agatha complained, looking over the schedule.
“But look on the bright side,” Violetta replied. “By the time we get home, you should be able to run rings around even Zeetha. Not that you’d necessarily be a match for me,” she added nonchalantly.
Agatha’s eyes narrowed. “You want to bet?”
Krosp chuckled. Well played, Violetta, he thought. Very well played.
Introduce her to movie night.
“We cannot start her off with Princess Bride,” Rodney insisted.
“Why not?” John asked. “It’s a classic.”
“Hello? ‘Death cannot stop true love; all it can do is delay it for a while’? I don’t care how plucky she is-her world just ended, literally. She gets to that line, she’s gonna start bawling.”
“Yeah, good point. Hadn’t thought about that.”
“Besides, Torren just got home, and you know what he’s gonna ask for.”
John chuckled. “Kid’s got good taste; gotta give him that.”
“You’ve never had popcorn before, seriously?” Amelia was asking Agatha as the next wave arrived.
Agatha and Violetta both shook their heads. “Is it American?” Agatha wondered. “We have had very little contact with the Americas since the Long War began.”
“Yeah. You know about corn, right, maize?”
“Yes. Lilith used to make a corn relish for canning.”
“Well, popcorn’s just a specific variety of corn that pops when you heat it.”
“It’s really good,” Ronon added. “It’s Teyla’s favorite Earth food.”
John looked around and frowned at Rodney. “Jennifer not coming?”
“No,” Rodney replied with a grimace. “She’s still mad at you about von Blitzengaard.”
“How come? He’s just fine, apart from some stuff Carson thinks is genetic.”
“Yeah, well, you know Jennifer.”
John huffed, but anything he was about to say next was forestalled by the arrival of Teyla and Carson, who were swinging Torren between them. “Hey, TJ!” John called. “Wanna help us pick the movie?”
“Star Wars, please!” Torren replied, running over for hugs.
Rodney shot John a told-you-so smirk and bent down to hug his favorite adopted nephew. John chuckled and waited his turn.
“These moving pictures-they are like plays, then, or operas?” Agatha asked. “I have built devices that record and play back moving images and sound before, but they were more like the hologram projector.”
“A bit of both, actually,” Carson replied. “Most are like plays, but the sets generally don’t look like stages. And then there are musicals, which are more similar to comic opera.”
“Well, most of them are,” Amelia amended. “Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stuff is pretty dark, like Phantom of the Opera.”
“Ooh,” John suddenly said at a volume only Rodney and Torren could hear. “I just remembered-Alderaan.”
Rodney grimaced. “Yeah, and Obi-Wan. Bad idea.”
“What’s wrong?” Torren whispered.
John picked him up with a grunt; at the rate the boy was growing, John wouldn’t be able to do that much longer. “Miss Agatha and Miss Violetta are kinda havin’ a hard time right now, buddy,” he whispered back. “So what say we wait on Star Wars for a few weeks and pick something where nobody dies?”
Torren thought a moment before breathing a suggestion into John’s ear.
John grinned. “Yeah, that’ll work. Good choice.”
Torren grinned back, and as soon as John let him down, he ran to pull Agatha and Violetta over to the best seats on the floor, then fetched them cushions and a bowl of popcorn before plopping down between them. All the other adults, and Krosp, quickly found seats while John put the DVD in the player and turned down the lights.
Krosp was asleep in minutes. But when Rodney looked over during “Moses Supposes” to see both Agatha and Violetta rapt in wonder at Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor’s footwork, he shot Torren a thumbs-up and got a blinding grin in reply. John was right; the kid did have good taste. Singin’ in the Rain was turning out to be the perfect choice.
Introduce her to computers.
Agatha gave the laptop a bemused look. “Where do I put the paper?”
Rodney started to scoff but then thought better of it. “Er, here.” He went to a shelf and retrieved an older model that wasn’t working anymore. “Here’s one you can take apart.” He shoved it into her hands and ushered her quickly into another lab.
When he checked on her three hours later, she had not only taken it apart, diagrammed everything in her notebook, and cleaned all the parts but started putting it back together again. When he walked past an hour after that, a cry of “HA! Genial!” told him she’d actually fixed the dang thing.
“Ah, Lantea?” he whispered. “Be careful about what parts of the database she can access.”
He couldn’t communicate with the city on quite the same level John and Agatha could, but he still felt Lantea’s amused agreement.
Introduce her to computer games.
On the eighth day, Agatha discovered Tetris and saw that it was good. And there was much rejoicing.
Give her books.
“She’s read them all?!” John yelped.
The librarian nodded. “The entire library.”
“Including War and Peace?”
“In the original Russian, no less. She finished it in two days.”
John rubbed the back of his neck, feeling awkward. After nine years, he still hadn’t made it past Book VI. “Guess we’ll have to find something else to keep Her Sparkiness occupied.”
“Oh, no, forgive me. Lady Heterodyne’s still working through the theoretical physics texts. I meant Lady Mondarev.”
John’s jaw dropped.
The librarian shrugged. “Well, Lady Mondarev isn’t taking notes. Lady Heterodyne is-fairly copious notes, from the sound of it; she’s had to build a dictaclank to stave off permanent writer’s cramp. I did suggest dictation software, but she insisted it needed to be in a form she could take home.”
“Oh, great.” John tapped his radio. “McKay, got any grunts you’re particularly annoyed with?”
“What’s she done this time?” Rodney radioed back.
“Dictaclank for note-taking. Wanna make sure that’s all it does.”
“On it.”
(It was in fact no more than a voice-controlled pen-wielding arm on wheels. It still tried to stab the offending scientist who tried to pick it up. Violetta probably shouldn’t have laughed as hard as she did.)
Ask her to babysit.
“And this one’s Uncle Rodney’s favorite,” Torren continued, bringing Agatha a well-worn copy of a Batman illustrated dime novel-er, comic book.
“I see,” Agatha replied. “So if these are comics, what’s a webcomic?”
He sat down beside her on his bed. “Earth’s got this really cool information network called the Internet or the World Wide Web. You have to get on it with a computer.”
“Ah, so a webcomic is a comic that’s put on the World Wide Web?”
“Right.”
She shuffled through the stack of comic books in her lap. “And are any of these people real?”
He sighed and drew his knees up so he could rest his chin on them. “I guess it depends on what you mean by real. Uncle Rodney says there’s all kinds of universes out there, so maybe. And maybe there’s some universe out there where we’re just a story.”
“It’s just hard to fathom someone from a completely different universe knowing so much about my life. I mean, the Heterodyne Boys books are one thing....”
“What are they?”
“Oh, books about the adventures my father and uncle had. They were heroes, too-not superheroes, but they were sparks, like this Batman. Some of the stories are sort of true; some of them are completely made up. Many of them have been turned into plays, like the ones we performed when I was with Master Payne’s circus.”
“Oh, yeah, that sounds like Wormhole X-Treme! and Wormhole X-Treme Beyond. They’re TV shows that are sort of based on things that happened here and at the SGC.”
“SGC?”
“Stargate Command. It’s on Earth.”
“Ah.”
“They’re not very good,” he confessed, flopping backward on the bed. “I like Star Trek a whole lot better. But maybe there’s a universe where there’s a TV show that tells what’s really happened here, and maybe there’s a universe where Star Trek is real and just hasn’t happened yet.”
“But how do the writers know? Or the artists, like this Herr Foglio who draws Girl Genius? It ought to be scientifically impossible.”
Torren shrugged. “How should I know? I’m five years old.”
Krosp laughed. “He’s got you there, Agatha.”
Agatha threw a pillow at him. “Just for that, I won’t ask the biologists for a spare mouse when I go see the wasp eater after training.”
“Meow! And I thought I was the cat in this group!”
Torren and Violetta laughed uproariously.
Next
Interlude
How to Entertain Your Heterodyne
Give her something to study.
“Oh, good morning, Krosp,” said Woolsey. “Where’s Lady Heterodyne?”
“Hologram room,” Krosp replied between bites of bacon-cheese omelet. “She will probably be there for a few hours yet.”
Woolsey blinked. “A few hours? The hologram’s presentation doesn’t run that long. Is she trying to memorize it?”
“No, but she probably will have by the time she has figured out how it works.”
“Oh, dear.” Woolsey touched his radio. “Dr. Zelenka, would you mind stopping by the hologram room to make sure Lady Heterodyne hasn’t dismantled it?”
Krosp didn’t need to know Czech to understand Zelenka’s response. He decided not to tell anyone that Violetta had confiscated all of Agatha’s tools and ensured that she’d gone in with only a pencil and notepad. When the Spark was on her, Agatha could cause all kinds of havoc with her bare hands.
All the same, it was something of a relief when the only topic about which Agatha and Zelenka were arguing in heated Russian when they walked into the mess hall ten minutes later was the definition of “unaccompanied.” Ah, well, at least these television gadgets looked simple enough not to provide much of a distraction from the content of Daniel Jackson’s instructional videos, which were next on the day’s agenda.
Take her offworld for trading missions.
“And then,” Agatha continued explaining the machine she’d just made as a bartering chip, “if you are stitching something really bulky, or if you are hired to quilt a blanket under time constraints or some such, you can use this lever”-she demonstrated-“to extend the arm and table and make it easier to reach the center.”
The seamstress had tears in her eyes. “How can I ever hope to afford such a marvel? The time it will save... the trade it will bring....”
“Well, I hardly want to take all your fabric or anything like that. Perhaps we could arrange credit with other merchants as well?”
When the group returned to the Gate five hours later, Ronon found himself hauling twice the amount of seed they’d been sent to acquire and a sack of beans that had looked interesting, while Violetta carried five large blank books Agatha planned to use for note-taking and Agatha herself carried enough fabric and sewing stuff to make clothes for both girls for a month and a dress for the Lucrezia clone to wear when the time came. Both girls were in standard Atlantis offworld uniforms for this trip, but no one had objected when they’d said they might prefer something closer to what they’d worn back home for everyday wear. At least if Agatha was sewing, she wasn’t building Replicators.
Ronon didn’t tell Agatha he had the sewing machine’s death ray attachment in his pocket. She probably already knew and didn’t care anyway.
Train her to fight.
A run through the city at dawn with John and Ronon. Bantos at 8 with Teyla, followed by sword practice with Ronon. Kickboxing with Amelia on Tuesdays. PT with Maj. Anne Teldy’s team on Wednesdays. Target practice every Thursday afternoon with Maj. Evan Lorne.
“I’m never going to have time to get any work done!” Agatha complained, looking over the schedule.
“But look on the bright side,” Violetta replied. “By the time we get home, you should be able to run rings around even Zeetha. Not that you’d necessarily be a match for me,” she added nonchalantly.
Agatha’s eyes narrowed. “You want to bet?”
Krosp chuckled. Well played, Violetta, he thought. Very well played.
Introduce her to movie night.
“We cannot start her off with Princess Bride,” Rodney insisted.
“Why not?” John asked. “It’s a classic.”
“Hello? ‘Death cannot stop true love; all it can do is delay it for a while’? I don’t care how plucky she is-her world just ended, literally. She gets to that line, she’s gonna start bawling.”
“Yeah, good point. Hadn’t thought about that.”
“Besides, Torren just got home, and you know what he’s gonna ask for.”
John chuckled. “Kid’s got good taste; gotta give him that.”
“You’ve never had popcorn before, seriously?” Amelia was asking Agatha as the next wave arrived.
Agatha and Violetta both shook their heads. “Is it American?” Agatha wondered. “We have had very little contact with the Americas since the Long War began.”
“Yeah. You know about corn, right, maize?”
“Yes. Lilith used to make a corn relish for canning.”
“Well, popcorn’s just a specific variety of corn that pops when you heat it.”
“It’s really good,” Ronon added. “It’s Teyla’s favorite Earth food.”
John looked around and frowned at Rodney. “Jennifer not coming?”
“No,” Rodney replied with a grimace. “She’s still mad at you about von Blitzengaard.”
“How come? He’s just fine, apart from some stuff Carson thinks is genetic.”
“Yeah, well, you know Jennifer.”
John huffed, but anything he was about to say next was forestalled by the arrival of Teyla and Carson, who were swinging Torren between them. “Hey, TJ!” John called. “Wanna help us pick the movie?”
“Star Wars, please!” Torren replied, running over for hugs.
Rodney shot John a told-you-so smirk and bent down to hug his favorite adopted nephew. John chuckled and waited his turn.
“These moving pictures-they are like plays, then, or operas?” Agatha asked. “I have built devices that record and play back moving images and sound before, but they were more like the hologram projector.”
“A bit of both, actually,” Carson replied. “Most are like plays, but the sets generally don’t look like stages. And then there are musicals, which are more similar to comic opera.”
“Well, most of them are,” Amelia amended. “Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stuff is pretty dark, like Phantom of the Opera.”
“Ooh,” John suddenly said at a volume only Rodney and Torren could hear. “I just remembered-Alderaan.”
Rodney grimaced. “Yeah, and Obi-Wan. Bad idea.”
“What’s wrong?” Torren whispered.
John picked him up with a grunt; at the rate the boy was growing, John wouldn’t be able to do that much longer. “Miss Agatha and Miss Violetta are kinda havin’ a hard time right now, buddy,” he whispered back. “So what say we wait on Star Wars for a few weeks and pick something where nobody dies?”
Torren thought a moment before breathing a suggestion into John’s ear.
John grinned. “Yeah, that’ll work. Good choice.”
Torren grinned back, and as soon as John let him down, he ran to pull Agatha and Violetta over to the best seats on the floor, then fetched them cushions and a bowl of popcorn before plopping down between them. All the other adults, and Krosp, quickly found seats while John put the DVD in the player and turned down the lights.
Krosp was asleep in minutes. But when Rodney looked over during “Moses Supposes” to see both Agatha and Violetta rapt in wonder at Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor’s footwork, he shot Torren a thumbs-up and got a blinding grin in reply. John was right; the kid did have good taste. Singin’ in the Rain was turning out to be the perfect choice.
Introduce her to computers.
Agatha gave the laptop a bemused look. “Where do I put the paper?”
Rodney started to scoff but then thought better of it. “Er, here.” He went to a shelf and retrieved an older model that wasn’t working anymore. “Here’s one you can take apart.” He shoved it into her hands and ushered her quickly into another lab.
When he checked on her three hours later, she had not only taken it apart, diagrammed everything in her notebook, and cleaned all the parts but started putting it back together again. When he walked past an hour after that, a cry of “HA! Genial!” told him she’d actually fixed the dang thing.
“Ah, Lantea?” he whispered. “Be careful about what parts of the database she can access.”
He couldn’t communicate with the city on quite the same level John and Agatha could, but he still felt Lantea’s amused agreement.
Introduce her to computer games.
On the eighth day, Agatha discovered Tetris and saw that it was good. And there was much rejoicing.
Give her books.
“She’s read them all?!” John yelped.
The librarian nodded. “The entire library.”
“Including War and Peace?”
“In the original Russian, no less. She finished it in two days.”
John rubbed the back of his neck, feeling awkward. After nine years, he still hadn’t made it past Book VI. “Guess we’ll have to find something else to keep Her Sparkiness occupied.”
“Oh, no, forgive me. Lady Heterodyne’s still working through the theoretical physics texts. I meant Lady Mondarev.”
John’s jaw dropped.
The librarian shrugged. “Well, Lady Mondarev isn’t taking notes. Lady Heterodyne is-fairly copious notes, from the sound of it; she’s had to build a dictaclank to stave off permanent writer’s cramp. I did suggest dictation software, but she insisted it needed to be in a form she could take home.”
“Oh, great.” John tapped his radio. “McKay, got any grunts you’re particularly annoyed with?”
“What’s she done this time?” Rodney radioed back.
“Dictaclank for note-taking. Wanna make sure that’s all it does.”
“On it.”
(It was in fact no more than a voice-controlled pen-wielding arm on wheels. It still tried to stab the offending scientist who tried to pick it up. Violetta probably shouldn’t have laughed as hard as she did.)
Ask her to babysit.
“And this one’s Uncle Rodney’s favorite,” Torren continued, bringing Agatha a well-worn copy of a Batman illustrated dime novel-er, comic book.
“I see,” Agatha replied. “So if these are comics, what’s a webcomic?”
He sat down beside her on his bed. “Earth’s got this really cool information network called the Internet or the World Wide Web. You have to get on it with a computer.”
“Ah, so a webcomic is a comic that’s put on the World Wide Web?”
“Right.”
She shuffled through the stack of comic books in her lap. “And are any of these people real?”
He sighed and drew his knees up so he could rest his chin on them. “I guess it depends on what you mean by real. Uncle Rodney says there’s all kinds of universes out there, so maybe. And maybe there’s some universe out there where we’re just a story.”
“It’s just hard to fathom someone from a completely different universe knowing so much about my life. I mean, the Heterodyne Boys books are one thing....”
“What are they?”
“Oh, books about the adventures my father and uncle had. They were heroes, too-not superheroes, but they were sparks, like this Batman. Some of the stories are sort of true; some of them are completely made up. Many of them have been turned into plays, like the ones we performed when I was with Master Payne’s circus.”
“Oh, yeah, that sounds like Wormhole X-Treme! and Wormhole X-Treme Beyond. They’re TV shows that are sort of based on things that happened here and at the SGC.”
“SGC?”
“Stargate Command. It’s on Earth.”
“Ah.”
“They’re not very good,” he confessed, flopping backward on the bed. “I like Star Trek a whole lot better. But maybe there’s a universe where there’s a TV show that tells what’s really happened here, and maybe there’s a universe where Star Trek is real and just hasn’t happened yet.”
“But how do the writers know? Or the artists, like this Herr Foglio who draws Girl Genius? It ought to be scientifically impossible.”
Torren shrugged. “How should I know? I’m five years old.”
Krosp laughed. “He’s got you there, Agatha.”
Agatha threw a pillow at him. “Just for that, I won’t ask the biologists for a spare mouse when I go see the wasp eater after training.”
“Meow! And I thought I was the cat in this group!”
Torren and Violetta laughed uproariously.
Next