gedulah

She'd thought working for Dr. Jackson would be a grand adventure. Daniel, he said to call him, and Kate knew him as a footnote to the academic community: a wild-eyed lunatic who cited unverifiable sources, discredited while she was still in grad school. She met him for the first time after men with briefcases came to her campus office and offered her a job she wasn't sure she wanted. She told them so; they left; Dr. Jackson returned two weeks later with a stack of forms three inches thick that she had to sign before he could try to persuade her. She was bored and curious. She signed. And Daniel Jackson grinned at her -- humble, boyish, brilliant -- and unveiled the Secret History of Earth.

She quit her job and moved to Colorado Springs the next day.

She saw Dr. Jackson ("Call me Daniel, really") for the next time at Orientation, where she sat in a darkened classroom and watched a slide-show of wonders. Half the people in the room with her were military; he'd mentioned it was a military program, but she'd managed to forget that.

Daniel sparkled. He didn't deliver a canned lecture. He spoke from the heart (off the cuff, on the fly), and it didn't matter what the question was, or how stupid, or how esoteric, he always had an answer. Most men in his position would constantly have reminded their audience of their superior experience, their vast qualifications, their primacy of access. Daniel behaved as if anyone could have done the things he'd done. She didn't hear about all of them from him, of course -- he was too unassuming. She heard about them from the other lecturers. Orientation was like falling down the rabbit hole, but the thought of working with such a extraordinary man sustained her. She might have lived her entire life without meeting an academician as brilliant as Dr. Daniel Jackson. There was so much she could learn.

The tocsin note underlying each beat of Orientation (dedication, sacrifice, commitment) meant less than nothing to her. Of course the Program required dedication and commitment. How could it not? They were working with primary sources thought long lost, cultures and ideas no one had ever discovered, a whole fertile field of learning just waiting for someone (her) to step in and blaze trails that had been long since homesteaded on Earth, made comfortable and familiar, overwritten with centuries of history (written by the victors) and conventional wisdom. No calm-voiced Sergeant on crutches delivering warnings on what the Program might cost them could dissuade her. What could happen to her from a desk, after all?

She sat and daydreamed through the history lecture being delivered by one of her future colleagues from the department she'd soon be a part of, a lecture that skimmed blithely across the surfaces of a depth Daniel Jackson had lamplighted for her, and let herself imagine what it would be like once she'd gotten through the boring necessities, once she was allowed access to all the material Daniel had intimated they had. Once she was allowed to show them all what she could really do.

The department she had been recruited for was called Xenoarchaeology and Linguistics (as in Xenolinguistics), and the most amazing thing about it was how amazing it wasn't: nothing more than a sprawling cubicle farm a mile beneath the surface of the Earth. She knew the stupidity of schoolgirl crushes, or interests that could be made to look like one, so when she arrived she didn't mention Daniel's name once. She didn't have to: in X/L's world, he was Britney Spears, Madonna, and Michael Jackson all rolled into one: Topic A during every coffee break and lull in the professional conversation.

What she heard, she put down to the ugliness of professional jealousy. Dr. Merrin said he was arrogant. Dr. Ling said he was rude. Dr. Bowyer said he was unreasonable. Kate didn't argue with them -- it would look too much like infatuation or brown-nosing -- but in her imagination she constructed scenarios in which she could say to them (out of experience): He's brilliant, and if you can keep up with him he's neither unreasonable or rude.

Comments about Daniel weren't the only things she heard -- to her face, whispered behind her back, muttered and moaned over the water cooler (X/L had a literal water cooler, in the corner of the multi-person office that everyone called the Fish Bowl, and Kate's desk was far too close), grumped about during a five-minute break here or a coffee run there. Nearly everyone she was introduced to smiled kindly at her when they were introduced (the smile she was familiar with from her postdoc work, the one that came with pleasantries attached and really meant "I am reserving judgement until I know if I'm going to want to poison you and drop you down a well"). Nearly everyone who'd been there for more than six months or so manufactured an excuse to take her aside and tell her that working here was going to mean sacrifice, that the pressures of the SGC would take their toll. She smiled in all the right places, thanked them for their concerns, and privately resolved that she'd be the one to buck the odds. Being here was worth it. Being here was the opportunity of a lifetime.

And weeks went by.

The first thing to vanish, devoured by the unslakable hunger of X/L and Stargate Command, was her personal life. She'd expected that: Major Simmons had warned all of them during Orientation that having a job they could never talk about or even refer to would take its toll on their relationships with people outside the Mountain. Kate didn't notice it all that much: she'd moved to a new city anyway, and it was just as easy not to make new friends, and to fob old ones off with vague references to fact-checking at a government think-tank. It was only a little annoying that none of her colleagues thought to wonder what possible use a working knowledge of Sumerian could be to the military.

The second thing to go was her free time, because the work was fascinating, and all-consuming, and there were never enough hours in the day to get everything done -- much less the time she needed to back-engineer her knowledge of Fertile Crescent languages into their contemporary (alien) analogues. She knew the information X/L received on the material passed to them was incomplete (for security reasons, Major Graham said, and Dr. Merrin said it was a very secure pissing contest), but she did wonder why "Goa'uld" was a dialect of ancient Egyptian. It was only when she dragged home at the end of a twelve-hour day (another twelve-hour day) to notice that still-unpacked boxes were stacked in every corner (she hadn't even gotten her books onto the bookshelves) and three months of mail was stacked on (sliding off of) her coffee table, that it occurred to her that she might as well move in to the complex instead of wasting valuable sleeping-or-working time driving home to an apartment she barely used. She walked into the kitchen and opened a refrigerator filled with the remains of delivery food from every source within fifteen miles (no time or energy to cook, and besides, she hadn't finished unpacking her cookware), and thought: I suppose it eventually gets better.

Daniel's appearances in X/L were the punctuation of her days. Sometimes he strolled in, looking as though he'd arrived by accident and unpremeditation, and spent half an hour or more wandering among the cubicles asking people what they were working on and poking among the litter of their desks as if looking for a lost sandwich. Though his arrivals were random, they were regular enough that Kate began saving up her questions for him. He'd sit on the corner of her desk, and wave his hands as he talked, pointing out where she'd gone wrong, or where she needed information she didn't have. He told her she'd have to "get up to speed," smiling that charming smile of his; he said it each time he stopped by her desk, and she wondered if it were just a personal quirk or if he didn't actually remember their previous conversations.

Other times he descended on them like a violent event of meteorological origin: storming into X/L demanding reports, memos, source materials. She realized she could predict these visitations by the fact that senior staff scattered like a covey of partridges just before he arrived. She didn't know how they got their early warning -- nobody she raised the subject with would or could say -- but it never seemed to matter whether they made successful escapes or not: Daniel would dig through the contents of his target's desk, scattering the unwanted material everywhere, rapping out questions (and following them with others) too fast for anyone to reply, until he vanished more quickly than he'd come, departing X/L at a dead run with books or files clutched to his chest. She knew he was one of the civilian specialists who went through the Stargate (an object she'd seen only in photos) not only because he'd mentioned it (modestly, in passing) during Orientation, but because Dr. Bowyer complained constantly to anyone who would listen about the fact that the head of their department was spending all of his time on other planets playing cowboy instead of behind his desk, in his office, signing off on budgets and reports and performance reviews and attending meetings with General Hammond to get X/L more funding. (Selina Ramirez, ABD, said once that Troy's only hope for peace in our time was if Dr. Jackson took a bullet to the brain while he was off world. Dr. Balasubramaniam said even that wouldn't help, but if that was a joke, Kate hadn't been here long enough to get it, and no one would explain it, either.)

It was something she wondered about, though, because even if the non-qualified (in the sense of not being approved to go through the Stargate) staff didn't see that much of the qualified-and-military contingent, there was still the comissary, the security checkpoints, the bus that conveyed them to the parking lot a mile down NORAD Road. If her weeks were punctuated by Daniel's visits, her days were punctuated by the sounds of klaxons and warning sirens, a constant assertion that she worked on the tacit front line of an undeclared war. She pieced together a picture of its battles and campaigns from references she didn't know and cryptic allusions to unknown things that flowed like an underground river through the conversations she had with the "qualified" archaeologists and linguists (military and civilian) that she talked to in corridors and elevators, supply closets and bathrooms, library and comissary. Their conversations footnoted names she knew and names she didn't with bizarre annotations: The Order of the Golden Coffin; The Order of the Revolving Pearly Gates; The Golden Stethoscope; The Lifetime Lifetime Achievement Award (she asked, and the speaker really did mean "Lifetime Lifetime" and added: "when you've been here longer you'll understand," a phrase Kate was beginning to think should just be printed on cards for people to hand out); The Winged Horse Reverse Clusterfuck Award; the Shiny Red Button Award; The Spanish Inquisition Five Kilometer Dash Award; The Daniel Jackson Prize for Excellence in Translation; The Carter Award for Excellence In Interface; The O'Neill Cultural Imperialism Award; The Harriman Trophy. (The Harriman Trophy was an actual object -- a victory cup made out of paper clips glued together -- and was given for the most creative supply requisition form. Dr. Ling told her about that one, which was how Kate discovered that these weren't just glosses, but unofficial awards, and that was when she started worrying about what they were given for.)

The "qualified" staff spoke as if it were inevitable she'd take her quals and join them. The anecdotes they offered up (cryptic, abridged, referential) made her wonder if she was crazy-or-brave enough, but it wasn't something she had to decide right now. Non-essential civilian specialists (the military's naming-of-names was a constant tactful insult) had to be affiliated with the Stargate Program for thirty-six months before they could test for offworld certification.

She began to think everyone was crazy here, as if she went down a rabbit hole instead of an elevator each morning in truth and the coffee urn in the commissary was stenciled with "Drink Me". She didn't have a lot of time to worry about it, though. More and more often she'd come in and her desk would be covered with cassettes and CDs and folders filled with photos and the bulky plastic cases of the magnetic tapes that were the military's standard for information storage. And a note saying: I need this yesterday in Daniel's illegible handwriting.

She did her best to do in hours what really required days and weeks, and it never mattered how much work she did, there was always more, and it was enough to have earned her tenure and everlasting fame -- assuming she'd been able to tell anyone she'd done it, or was actually still affiliated with a university. She didn't know whether it was because someone had fed Daniel Jackson after midnight (she couldn't remember the last time she'd gone to a movie, or for that matter, spent an evening with her brain turned off in front of the television), propinquity, or the fact she was learning to see all the things in the mysterious invisible world her coworkers lived in (it might have been that Dr. Haddad, their senior Sumerian expert, got certified for offworld and a few days later a memo came around from General Hammond requesting a moment of silence at 11:30 am), but for whatever reason, she began to dread Daniel's appearances in X/L. She wondered if she'd just been coincidentally absent all the other times Daniel stalked in brandishing a report, and with implacable, icy, adamantine politeness cited and dissected every lapse, every gloss, every error in translation as his subjects attempted to pretend they didn't mind. He never raised his voice or used profanity, and never stooped to personal insult, to calling their education and intelligence deficient. He never said the obvious thing: when you make mistakes, people die. He rattled off sources and cross-references and prior instances at machine-gun pace, and Kate couldn't even pretend to herself that he'd prepared them in advance, because Dr. Hoxha always argued with him and Dr. Rosenberg frequently suggested alternative possibilities, and no matter what they said, Daniel bludgeoned them into acquiescence with codices of refutation.

The first time she'd met him, she'd thought he was a humble man; the obverse of that was his seeming blindness to ego in others. When he dissected their work, he dissected them: Kate didn't know whether he didn't know, or knew and didn't care. In everything he did and said, there was the unspoken assumption, accusation: I can do this, and if I can, why can't you?

They couldn't do it because they weren't Dr. Daniel Jackson.

She found herself looking for an explanation, some insight into the mind of Daniel Jackson, and the more she looked, the more she despaired. She had four books, photocopied and plastic-bound, on her desk that he'd written. Any one of them would have earned him another doctorate if he'd been able to share. (In fields that weren't even his specialty.) He'd made extensive entries in the X/L Wiki. You could search the Wiki by author, filtering by originator, edits, reversions, expansions. The more she read through his articles, the more she began to flinch any time he used the word "obviously," because whatever he went on to say wasn't obvious. She stayed for hours after her regular shift -- around the clock, more and more often -- rechecking his citations, trying to follow his arguments. And "A" implied "B", but "C" never followed -- it was "M" or "W" or some letter not even in the Latin alphabet: Tau or Gimmel or Yuzz-a-ma-Tuzz.

He was brilliant. He was unique. And the peerless Dr. Daniel Jackson expected to surround himself with peers, expected everyone in X/L to equal him. His frustration when they didn't was only equaled by his insistence that they could; his refusal to believe it was impossible, his conviction that they could if only they tried hard enough. He didn't just demand excellence, or even perfection. He demanded the impossible.

The day he spent thirty minutes (it would have been two hours if he'd spoken at a normal pace) taking her translation of the carved symbols on a wall in a structure "of unknown purpose" completely apart and saying he wanted the revised report done by the end of the day (he didn't call her a moron; he just said she had to learn to think for herself), Dr. Ling followed her into the bathroom, where she'd gone to weep hormonal tears of pure fury. She wasn't devastated. She wanted to kill something.

"Tell me," she said to Dr. Ling's reflection in the bathroom mirror, her jaw clenched so tightly she could hear her teeth creak like the timbers of a storm-wracked ship, "Tell me it gets better."

"For values of "better" involving emotional estrangement and alcoholism, yes," Dr. Ling answered. She shrugged minutely, dismissing the possibility of that being a joke. "You learn to deal. Come on. You aren't the first person here he's reduced to tears. You won't be the last. Get as much done on that as you can and I'll buy you a drink on your way home from work."

She met Dr. Ling's reflected gaze. The two mirrored images were side-by-side, and she realized there was no difference between the expressions in their eyes. When you've been here longer you'll understand. Everyone had said it. And only now, when like Inanna (goddess of sex, beer, writing, and death, patron of academics everywhere), she'd passed through the gates of Hell and given up something at each step in her descent to claim the prize -- social life and private life and ego and self-respect -- was she starting to understand. There were no victors in war, someone said once. There was no sanity, either.

She'd come to Stargate Command to learn.

She was learning.