Heart's Desire (36 page)

She supposed she'd seen pictures of something similar in video taken by one of the SG teams. They'd explored a lot of worlds and found a lot of Goa'uld technology, and the only reason that they didn't have a drive like this already was…

Well, she supposed they just hadn't stumbled on one that was this easy to reconstruct. And after all, they'd been doing fine with their space program ever since the Asgard had shared their ship and weapons technology. This would just be an added refinement to the small fighters they were testing already.

She slid the last crystal into place and crossed her fingers before she threw the power switch. Of course, it might not work the first time—

The device hummed, and Sam grabbed at the lab bench as she felt herself suddenly nearly weightless. She gave the device an experimental little push and watched it drift slowly just above the surface of the lab bench as if it weren't the size of a large television set. She quickly moved to catch it; it still retained all its mass, and if it picked up speed, it would be an alarming projectile in the lab.

When it stopped, she disconnected the power and glanced at the computer screen to check the device's energy usage while it had been turned on.

“Absolutely perfect,” she said, and then told herself she shouldn't be surprised.

D
aniel went home intending to work on his latest paper for an hour or two before Sha're got home, so that he could eat dinner with her without being distracted by thoughts on the dating of Egyptian artifacts. Once he sat down in his office, though, he found himself strangely unable to concentrate. He typed a few words and then found himself staring out the window, watching a bird rustling the branches of a tree outside the glass.

Building a nest, he thought. Soon it would have babies to feed and protect and teach to fly. He wondered if it was uneasy about the process, too, or if it remained oblivious to the ultimate purpose of its determined gathering of twigs.

This wasn't the first time it had occurred to him that soon they would have an actual baby, though, and he felt more off-balance than he thought that ought to account for. He scrolled back to read the last couple of pages of the paper, trying to focus his thoughts. Everything he had written made sense, but it seemed strangely flat, now, as if he couldn't remember why it had seemed so important.

It might just be that his priorities were shifting. He'd always put academia first, never had any other demands on his time, but now that he had a family, things had to be different. That was a good thing, and if he felt sometimes that he wasn't sure what was important, it was only to be expected that he would feel a little confused. As if no matter what he was doing, there was some other thing that he should be doing that would have been more important.

He heard the front door opening as Sha're came in and called “Daniel!” cheerfully.

“I'm in my office,” he called back.

She stuck her head in the door, her hair damp and curling wildly from the rain. “Dinner in half an hour,” she said.

“Okay.” He was tempted to follow her when she went out, to put aside his unsettled mood and go make himself useful in the kitchen. Making himself useful, though, that was the thing that nagged at him.

He wasn't sure why. The research he was doing wasn't exactly searching for a cure for cancer or the solution to world hunger, but most research wasn't. It was one more piece in the puzzle of the pyramid builders, and he was proud of the slow assembling he'd done so far. “There is no rush,” Nick always said. “The past is not going anywhere.”

He was reluctant to dismiss the feeling entirely, though. It was possible that there was some connection he was missing in the paper that would shed light on the entire subject in a new way. It had happened that way for him before, a frustrated sense that something was wrong driving him until he found a solution.

It probably wasn't aliens. Daniel shook his head, thinking that he would never have his grandfather entirely figured out. The man could be ruthlessly practical, and then come up with a wildly fanciful theory that he insisted explained all of the mysteries about the pyramid builders. As far as Daniel was concerned, it was nothing more than an example of the over-application of Occam's Razor. The simplest solution might be the preferable one, all other things being equal, but that didn't mean that “aliens did it” was the answer to everything.

The words rang false as he thought them. This was all a smoke-screen, a wall of words that he was throwing up to keep himself from figuring out… something. Something that was both scary and important. That was frightening because it was so important. Because it would change everything.

“It can't be aliens,” he said, staring at the computer screen.

“What can't be aliens?” Sha're said, reappearing in the doorway.

“I was just thinking about Nick's theory about the pyramids being modeled after the shape of alien spaceships,” Daniel said.

She shook her head, looking amused. “We can rule out the aliens, surely?”

“I had. I have. I just… now I feel like that connects to something that isn't an entirely ridiculous theory, and I'm not sure what it is exactly. It's really frustrating.”

She smiled sympathetically. “You will think of it soon, I am sure.”

“Maybe so,” Daniel said as she went out again.

He tried once again to focus on the paper. Surely he'd been interested in this yesterday. He would finish it up and send it in to the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, and it would lead to some interesting discussions in archaeology newsgroups and be a good publication to have on his curriculum vitae.

And then he would shepherd his students through their final exams, and the semester would be over. He would spend the summer with his wife and his newborn son, and have plenty of time to poke at Nick's wild theories if he wanted to, and all would be right with the world. There was no reason to feel like there would still be something missing, some turn that he was passing that he would regret not taking, some gate that he should be passing through—

The word sent chills down his spine, and he froze, the letters on the screen blurring together into meaningless light. A gate. There had been something about a gate, one of the inscriptions on a cartouche at Abydos that he had translated that had seemed like poetic wordplay at the time. He was abruptly certain that it was important, with a cold certainty that settled like a dead weight in the pit of his stomach.

“Sealed and buried for all time,” he murmured. Hadn't that been how the inscription ran? There had been something about Ra, what he had taken for a listing of his godly attributes and possessions…
a million years into the sky
, had that been part of it? And then,
His Stargate
.

He reached for the leather-bound journal he kept in his desk drawer, the original record of the inscriptions he had found in Abydos. He kept it nearby as much for sentimental value as for reference
—
it also included the journal entries he had made when he first met Sha're, and when they had been falling in love
—
but it would have his original copy of the inscription, and the sketch he could half-see in his mind's eye, a distinctive curved shape like a ring.

He flipped the pages, frowning. The inscription wasn't there.

There was no record of a “Stargate,” no inscription that referred to anything as “sealed and buried for all time.” There was no sketch that even vaguely resembled the carved ring of stone he expected to find. He'd kept all his field notes in this journal through the entire Abydos dig. If that inscription had ever existed, it should have been in the journal.

He must have seen it somewhere else. Maybe it had been someone else's discovery, some journal article he'd read or some artifact he'd seen in a museum or university collection. Could it have been in Catherine's collection? She'd inherited some amazing pieces that she'd shown him the same year he went on the Abydos dig in Egypt, when she was trying to persuade him to…

To help her catalogue her collection. That was how they'd met. He remembered it perfectly well, and yet he felt like there was something he was missing there, too, some conversation they'd had soon after they met that wasn't about his plans for the Abydos dig that was important now.

He picked up the phone, hesitating for a moment, and then dialed her number.

“Daniel,” she said with pleasure when she answered. “What can I do for you?”

“I wanted to ask you if you remembered anything in your father's collection that might have been called a Stargate,” Daniel said.

“No, Daniel,” Catherine said immediately. “There was nothing like that.”

That ought to settle that, but… her answer was almost too immediate, too certain. He would have expected her to ask him what exactly he was translating as Stargate, and what kind of artifact he thought it might be, and why.

“You're sure,” he said.

“Entirely certain,” Catherine said. “That is not a path you want to go down.”

“Have we talked about this before?” Daniel asked, frowning. “Or… did Nick ask you about this? Was this part of one of his theories?”

“You would know better than I,” Catherine said. “I am sorry, Daniel, I am on my way out the door and I must not be late. You will call me again, yes? And we will talk about things more important than this Stargate. Have you chosen a name yet?”

“Not yet,” Daniel said. “Sha're suggests naming him after my father, but I'm not sure I can inflict ‘Melburn' on another generation, and she's equally dubious about ‘Kasuf,' so we're going round. He'll probably end up named something really ordinary like ‘Jack.'”

“There is nothing wrong with that,” Catherine said, and he could hear the smile in her voice. “Be happy, Daniel.”

She hung up before he could reply.

He flipped to a blank page in the notebook and began sketching out the lines of the stone ring he remembered. There was a clear inner and outer ring, and somehow that was important. And there were symbols, some that seemed familiar, and one that he drew larger in the center of the ring, an inverted V with a circle above it and small crossbars below the strokes.

A man? No, the triangle shape was a pyramid, and above it the setting sun.
That is not a path you want to go down.
He could still hear Catherine's voice, and some part of him knew that she was right. He was close to the answer now, a few questions away from it, and when he found it, it would change everything.

“Dinner!” Sha're called.

His chest clenched in sudden unreasoning fear. He ripped out the page from the notebook and crumpled it in his hand. It would be better to throw it away and forget all about this, he thought. It would be safer that way.

He stood there for a moment, hesitating, and then unfolded the paper. He carried it with him into the kitchen and smoothed it out on the table as Sha're put a plate in front of him.

“Does this look familiar to you, Sha're?” he said. “Because I'm really sure I've seen it somewhere before.”

J
ack wove his way toward Daniel's hearth through the crowd of curious people gathered around to see the Tau'ri who had come to visit. They made it to Abydos whenever they could, or whenever Rothman got particularly stuck on his translations, but they still weren't there often enough for Sha're's people to be entirely used to guests showing up through the chappa'ai.

“Sha're!” Skaara called. “I have brought O'Neill and Daniel's friends!”

Sha're ducked out from behind a hanging blanket, smiling at them. “You must forgive my Daniel,” she said. “He has gone to look at more writings.”

“That sounds like Daniel,” Carter said. “It's good to see you, Sha're.”

“You must sit and have some tea,” Sha're said. “Or would you rather go out to him?”

“We'll hang out here,” Jack said. Sha're raised her eyebrows at him with the very polite expression she wore when he'd said something she didn't understand. “Tea would be very nice, thank you.”

She smiled at that and poured the tea. Skaara dropped down to sit next to O'Neill. “You must tell me of your great deeds,” he said.