“I am not offended. Just curious…”
Fenrir came closer. She watched him walking; the Asgard seemed so frail, so delicate, as if a stiff breeze would blow him away like a bundle of sticks; and again she felt a pang of sympathy for the alien, of sorrow.
He looked up at her. “I… Have had little company in the past years. The Risar are only reflections of my own psyche and the Heruuni… Those I attempted to speak to at first were unable to think of me as anything other than some form of deity. But you, Teyla Emmagan. You are the first human I encountered who challenged me, who did not fear me. I wish to know you.”
It wasn’t the response Teyla expected at all. She wasn’t sure how to respond; she took a different tack instead. “Where are the other crew of the Aegis?”
“There are none,” he explained. “Our ships are highly automated. At the most, our craft require only one, perhaps two Asgard to operate it. In the event of a larger crew requirement, Risar can be deployed.”
“You must be lonely.” The last word threatened to catch in her throat.
“I have known that emotional state, yes. But I have had my work and the repairs to occupy my mind.”
Teyla paused, weighing her thoughts. On the one hand, she could not deny she felt a kind of kinship to the lost Asgard, but at the same time she questioned the things that he had done to the Heruuni. “Fenrir, you spoke of challenge. I must do so again, and ask you this — why did you prey upon the natives of this world?”
“They were not prey,” said the alien, affront in his voice. “I did not mistreat them. I regret what I was forced to do, but you must realize that I had no other choice.”
“But the sickness, this malaise caused by the nanite markers you used. I saw the process of insertion, remember. I saw what you tried to do to Ronon.”
The Asgard was silent for a long time, and the hologram flickered slightly. “I am sorry for any pain or suffering I may have caused. That was never my intention, you must believe me. I had no idea that the markers would create a side-effect.” He walked across to the stasis pod and in an odd moment of reflection, the holographic Asgard stared down at his living, dormant body. When he spoke again, it was with genuine regret. “I have made so many mistakes in my life, Teyla Emmagan. But sometimes the course of right lies beyond our reach, no matter how hard we try to grasp it.”
Fenrir’s words cut deeper than Teyla wanted to admit. She returned to her earlier thread of conversation. “Doctor McKay spoke of how your species are from another galaxy.”
“We call it Othala,” he nodded.
“What was it that brought you out here, to Pegasus?”
The hologram flickered again. “My voyage… Was an extended mission of scientific research,” explained the Asgard. “It gave much opportunity to think.” He was silent for a moment, his gaze turned inward. “We Asgard are caught in a dilemma. Assailed by outside forces, we strive to endure. My species do not have the biological ability to procreate as yours do.”
“You reproduce by cloning yourselves.”
Another nod. “Genetic duplication of a host body.” Fenrir pointed a long-fingered hand at the stasis pod. “Neural patterning technology allows us to transfer memories and persona from a dying body to a new one… But one must question, Teyla, if that is truly life or just a facsimile.”
Despite herself, the Athosian’s expression clouded at the alien’s description of his artificial immortality. “But how can that be an existence? It is not a continuation. You are dying over and over again, each new Asgard only a copy of the last…”
“And the copies fade over time. I have observed that some civilizations believe in the existence of an ephemeral component to a living consciousness, an essence that transcends crude matter in the moment of death.”
“A soul.”
“That is one term for it. And if such a thing does exist, then I fear that the souls of the Asgard people were lost a long time ago.”
She crossed to the capsule. “Perhaps not. On Athos, we believe that a person is not born with a soul, only the seed of one. We believe that it can only become fully formed through deeds, through work and sacrifice, through self-knowledge.”
Fenrir’s small mouth turned in something that could have been a smile. “Then perhaps there is a chance for my people yet to know such a thing.”
Teyla returned a rueful smile. The Asgard continued to confound her expectations of him; she began to understand what it was about these aliens that so intrigued the people of Earth. There was a sadness about the lone being that was undeniable; and yet she also sensed something hidden, something more than the Fenrir she was being allowed to see. The hologram was as much a mask as it was the reality.
“I envy you,” he said abruptly, coming closer. “You carry a growing life within you, the merging of your genetic matrix with another of your kind, and more. It is at once such a complex and wondrous thing, and yet so simple a process. But for all the great knowledge of the Asgard, we cannot duplicate so basic a biological function. Our every attempt to stem the tide of decay has been a failure. The very process we have used to survive will eventually destroy us.”
Fenrir raised a tentative hand and held it before Teyla’s belly, as if he were afraid to touch her; then the hologram flickered once more and his limb dropped to his side, as he remembered that he could never actually make contact with her, not with a mere pattern of photons and energy. “The Asgard are fast approaching an evolutionary dead end,” he said, “and when that point is reached, the light of our civilization, the sum of all we are, will be extinguished.”
Teyla’s silent self-reproach burned like acid in her chest. “I am sorry,” she told him. It was as close to the truth as she dared to voice.
In the drive chamber of the Aegis, a ball of energy that looked like a piece of the sun roiled and spun inside a column of pure anti-protons. Around it orbited contra-rotating rings of systemry that turned about each other in mid-air; and beyond them were vanes made of crystalline circuits and conduits channeling enough raw power to punch a hole through the fabric of space-time.
‘Cool’ was the word that Samantha Carter would have used if someone had asked her to describe it. Under normal laws of physics, anyone standing where she was would have been instantly immolated by the catastrophic bombardment of exotic radiation, but inside the Asgard engine room, protected by force fields and quantum baffles, she felt nothing but the slightly-below-room-temperature ambience that the Asgard seemed to like aboard their ships.
She glanced at the data pad in her hand; confirming that the power train from the drive core was stable, she tugged on the fiber optic cable connecting it to the monitor station where she stood and detached the device. Carter stood silently for a moment, basking in the glow of a science she could only just begin to understand. From what the SGC’s best minds had been able to comprehend, Asgard ships used the energy differential states in captured remnants of neutron stars to power their vessels. Just the basic mechanics of making something like that work were beyond the ragged edge of humanity’s knowledge of quantum mechanics and cosmology, and Sam was enthused by the enormity of it.
“One day,” she said aloud, “one day when we’re not looking over our shoulders for the next invasion, I’m going to take one of you boys to bits and figure out what makes you tick.”