06 - Siren Song (11 page)

“And you,” Sebek repeated.

Aris was slow to respond to the order, his stare verging on openly insolent
as he swung his blaster up—pausing as the muzzle passed Sebek’s chest—to
rest on his shoulder. He backed up the slope to the tunnel entrance.

“Your usefulness is waning, my friend,” Sebek warned him. There was a flash
of comprehension in Aris’ eyes. He surely had to know, now, that he was but a
tool for use by his god.

“Then how ’bout you follow through on the deal, and I’ll be out of your hair?
My lord.” The pause between demand and honorific was slight.

Sebek let his smile thin, more cruel than amused. “We will decide when you
have fully fulfilled your obligations.
We
are obliged to do nothing.”
Die
pulsed again, throbbing behind his eyes, and he closed his mailed hand
into a fist, lowered it to his side.

Aris looked like he was going to say more, but then his face hardened into a
still mask. Instead of speaking, he took another backward step into the gloom of
the tunnel and disappeared. Sebek dismissed him from thought and turned back to
the door.

The silent script was more familiar now. It was oddly primitive-looking, as
though the vaguely human figures dancing in an evocative, simplistic landscape
had been scraped out with a crude tool. But the refined material of the
impenetrable door belied that notion. Neither obviously metal and not quite
stone, the substance was one that Sebek had never seen before, and a quick skim
through the sea of past knowledge suggested that no Goa’uld in his line had,
either. As simple as the figures appeared when taken one at a time, their
overall arrangement, the way they seemed to interlock and mirror and parody each
other, suggested that there was something sophisticated about them, something
more than mere pictographic or even developed ideographic logic at work.
“Ideographic,” he murmured aloud, testing the new word.

His fingers were numb again when he ran them over the carvings.
Loss
hissed for a second in his blood and was gone. Adjustments were made and then
there was tingling and a settling in; his hands became his hands. The edges of
the figures were still sharp. In all the eons that this door had remained closed, no one had caressed its message
into smoothness, nor had the corrosive air within the mine dulled it. It had
remained in this pristine state for him. It would whisper its secrets only to
him.
If.

He leaned forward and rested his forehead, then his cheek, against the words.
He could sense it now, the secret purring against his eardrum, ready to resolve
into speech. Somewhere in the clutter and whirl of the host’s stolen memories
there was a key. But although the script was familiar and clearly
waiting
for Sebek, it was still opaque, and although Sebek closed his eyes and felt the
secret leaving its mark on his skin, although he followed the host’s memory into
the centre of this knot where dog-eared books fell open on loose spines, where
the images of inscribed tablets and the staring stone faces of Easter Island
were overlaid with the sharp-stale smell of fermented beer and the past-ripe
scent of pink blossoms outside a window, there was no understanding there,
nothing to unfold. What the host knew was that it didn’t know.

Sebek growled. Next to his cheek, the undeciphered writing seemed to hum
through his bones. Inside, the blue gaze sharpened, attentive, and Sebek’s
fingers were numb when he raised them and used them to rub at his eyes. He could
still smell pink flowers and their cloying sweetness, brown-edged petals
falling, past their prime—
unbearable—
Sebek pushed away from the wall,
his empty hand outstretched toward the drifting memory—there, somehow at the
center of the knot, something else. In the spring there were flowers in the
trees, and Sebek felt
grief bloom
outward, a dark flower wilting against
the blue, a vine knotted. He followed it backward, inward, downward. The host
resisted, but there was no resisting now. The book in the memory, the images of
staring stone sentinels and dancing human forms, blocky Ancient script, a bed
with crumpled sheets and the shadows of branches, another bed, stained with
seeping, blood, a knot of bandages around softening bone… experience lying in
layers, connected not in time, but in sense. The smell of blossoms, brown,
falling.
Rot.

The pain in the memory was intense, and the host’s body jerked so that
Sebek’s head struck the door sharply. He staggered a bit before he contained the response, created distance between himself and the
memory and the host. In his mind’s eye he held them at bay, one in each hand,
present and past, body and mind balanced across the fulcrum of his own perfect
control. He turned his attention to the left hand where the memory throbbed. In
it, this one, this host, was dying. His body was dissolving, and the petals of
the flowers curled inward, brown, unanchored, drifted downward. Sebek was
familiar with the sensation of dying—Bastet and Yu had taught him that—and
with the miracle of awakening in the sarcophagus. This host knew that miracle,
too; Sebek found the memory close by, the next page in the book. But this, this
dying was different. Beyond the dying there was
—fear, yearning—
there
was—
escape, elation—
beyond dying there was not death, and not the
return to the heaviness of flesh. There was something more… wondrous.

This one had resisted, but there was no resistance now. Sebek breathed in the
scent of flowers and around him vastness opened, embracing, fathomless
plenitude. The stone faces stared up from the book, the figures paced their way
through their dance from margin to margin, and beneath and beyond there was
meaning, a slowly flowing ocean where this language was not unknown. The
pictures in the book were mute, but the flowers outside the window were a
doorway to something else.
No.
The memory in his hand was water in a
broken bowl, and soon it would drain away. The body in his other hand thrashed.

When Sebek turned his head to look at the writing on the door, the blocky
regularity of the Ancient script no longer spoke itself in twenty imperfect
languages, but spoke in its own. And the second script behind it leaned so
close, so close to Sebek’s ear he could practically feel it breathing. In the
memory there was no flesh, no flesh at all, only release, expansion.
No. No,
no, no.
In Sebek’s body, here and now, the host’s heart stumbled, recovered,
began to race. Sebek strained to hear the voice, the secret. His breath came in
heaving, sour gusts. The hands that braced him against the door were perfectly
without feeling.
No. No.
The alien script had a voice that was sweet,
promising, and the Ancient sea rocked back and forth speaking, speaking
everything. And everything was there, just there, so vast and full it was like nothingness, and his body made a noise, a
howl of pain.

“No!”

The word filled the room, leaving a hole inside him where it tore itself
free. His throat hurt. “My—” he began, but, disoriented by contradiction, the
sentence wouldn’t form. He felt himself lowered to the floor and his knees
pulled up, as his arms hugged them and he rested his forehead on them. “My
throat hurts,” the host rasped, his voice echoing thinly in the vault. “Mine,
you son of a bitch.”

The first thing Daniel did was to thrash. His legs kicked out and his head
cracked backward into the vault door, and it wasn’t enough. Sebek was still in
there. After a long time, Daniel undamped his hands from the back of his neck.
The fingernails of the left one were red crescents. The sight of the ribbon
device on the other hand made him thrash again.
Murder
pulsed behind his
eyes and the crystal in his palm glowed lividly. He scrambled away from it,
away, anywhere. When he came back to himself he found he’d worked his way across
the floor into the corner where the vault door met the black stone of the mine.
He lay on his side, curled up tight, and his breath was hot and sickly with fear
and anger. His hands were on the back of his neck again. The slick touch of the
gold caps on his fingers made him retch, and he pulled at the ribbon device,
abandoning the effort after a moment; it seemed too difficult. There was nothing
in his stomach to come up, so he rolled onto his knees and spat onto the stone
between his hands, then sat down, leaning against the wall.

“O-oh-kay,” he told himself shakily. “What say we get a grip?” He looked
around the chamber. He was alone. “I’m Daniel…” Eyes roaming the empty room,
he waited as though for someone to contradict him. “I’m Daniel Jackson and I
have a snake in my head.” The matter-of-fact tone of it seemed to help a little,
except that his hand started clawing at the skin at the nape of his neck again,
and he had to physically restrain it with the other. “And I’m… talking.”
Again, he waited, blinking into the relative silence. “And that’s strange,
considering.”

Using his mailed hand to brace himself against the door, he slipped on the metal surface, fell, and had to try again with the other. When
he’d gotten to his feet, he leaned heavily on the door, his hand with the ribbon
device held away from him like it was contaminated.

“Sha’re,” he blurted suddenly and nodded. “Yes. She was able to speak when
Amaunet was dormant…” His voice trailed away as he shook his head. “But you
aren’t pregnant, Dr. Jackson. So what makes you so special?” He realized
belatedly that the question was directed as much at the Goa’uld in his head as
it was at himself. The idea that the snake might answer threatened thrashing
again, but he breathed hard through his nose and stared at a spot on the far
wall until the panic settled into reasonably manageable background noise.

He could feel Sebek. There was a coiling at the base of his skull, not a
physical sensation, really, but something like bad news coming, a dark, heavy,
cold-water tension. Having a Goa’uld in his head, it turned out, felt an awful
lot like dread. On that bizarre level where Daniel spent more time than was
strictly healthy these days, that was comforting. He’d had lots of practice
dealing with dread. And it wasn’t like Sebek was the first house-guest who’d
arrived uninvited and refused to leave. One snake couldn’t be that much more
horrible than the voices of Ma’chello’s ghostly-schizo Goa’uld-crazymaker. Of
course, the Linvris had never really been there. Now, Daniel was awake, and
Sebek was definitely there.

“Why do I always have to do the pep talks?” he wondered aloud. “I’m clearly
very, very bad at them.”

As he stood there for what felt like a long time, long enough for his
tailbone to get sore from leaning against the door, it occurred to him that he
didn’t seem to be running away, even though running away, maybe finding his team
and springing them from detention and going home and getting the snake out of
his head all seemed to be a good plan on the face of it. He rubbed his hand
across his mouth and stood there in the vault, realizing eventually that he was
pretty much waiting for the Jaffa to come and haul him off to jail. That’s how
it went, wasn’t it? SG-1 either got away or thrown in jail. Daniel had obviously
not gotten away. But there were no Jaffa, because Sebek had dismissed them. The
dread at the base of his skull seemed to draw itself up, uncoiling and humming like a high-voltage wire.
Power.
His own spine straightened with it.
Assurance.

Of course the Jaffa wouldn’t arrest him. They wouldn’t do a damn thing to
him.

He was their god.

The thought felt good, and the good feeling made him sick again, but the plan
seemed a little more manageable. He could simply order his team’s release.
Nobody was going to question their god. And that thrumming in his spine that was
Sebek and his arrogance, he could take advantage of that. He could play Goa’uld.

He stood, unmoving, in the vault.

His neck itched. Absently, he fingered the scrapes and cuts he’d left with
his fingernails. His hand came away flaked with dried blood, but there were no
scrapes or cuts anymore.

It was this that tipped him off the edge of himself. Sebek was under the
skin. His tusked head was buried in Daniel’s brainstem. The snake’s body,
infinitely divided into finer and finer ganglia, insinuated itself into every
function, controlled every secretion and every prickling of nerves. He was
everywhere.
What was left was this small, floating island called Daniel.
Under the surface, Sebek was Leviathan, dark-backed and looming, waiting. And
Daniel found himself staring down into the depths. Rubbing his fingers together,
feeling the disintegrating flakes of his own dried blood, Daniel felt the
elegant, sinuous power of it, of this
thing
that could smooth away the
evidence of Daniel’s panic, just like that, the
control
it represented,
the absolute awareness and engrossment. Unlike Daniel, who daily skirted the
edges of what his own mind refused to show him, Sebek had no subconscious.
Everything was surface in him, exposed. And it was so close, Daniel could feel
Sebek inside.

The dark shape rose up under him, and with it came eons of memory, like a
cold current lifting darkness into the light.
Run away,
he thought.
Play Goa’uld.
He stood still and stared into the rising shadow under his
feet. Answers, thousands of years there, just there. Weaknesses. Failures.
Strategies. Hatred.
Desire.
More, more, more. The generations of Sebek’s
line flung themselves into the future, carried themselves forward in the DNA,
remembering what they wanted, what had been unfulfilled, each one hungrier than the last,
every disappointment tabulated, every revenge calculated. Daniel clutched at his
stomach as Sebek’s desire coursed along nerve endings, became a hollowness in
Daniel’s body.
Don’t look,
Daniel said, and kept looking. Sebek was a
pure desire. He was pure focus. Pure. He was beautiful.