Mathématique: Chapter 28

“Are you going to look at that?” Vala glanced at the legal-pad filled with math. “Or just stand in your doorway like an artistically disheveled Ambassador of Men’s Dress Shirts?”

Chapter warnings: Stressors of all kinds. Grief. Physical injuries. Mental health challenges.

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 28

A week post-Altera, Rush sat beside his window and watched water vapor condense in the upper atmosphere. (Fuckin’ finally.) Maybe it’d bloody rain. For once.

Tesla had come here, with his voltage differentials, his dreams of annihilating distance, and his obsessive tendencies. He’d come to Colorado Springs post-fire, pre-pigeon, and, here, he’d measured the resonant frequency of the planet.

(Maybe Rush should befriend a pigeon.)

The sun was bright, the air was bright, it was a Wednesday, and he was having a difficult time.

Demonstrably true, a corollary, probably true, and certainly true.

(Was it a Wednesday?)

Rush let his head fall back against the wall, surveyed the impersonal expanse of his empty rooms, and tried to decide whether he’d hallucinated a trip to an alien world. The contrast between the melodic winds and pale sky and his suburban-sprawl box of an American apartment couldn’t’ve been sharper.

Certain elements of his existence were turning improbable. Several sigmas distant from any mean he’d have recognized half a decade back.

The tail end of a bell curve was a precarious place to live.

Fortunately, as he’d recently instituted a policy of not anthropomorphizing graphical systems used to represent data, he need not concern himself with such things.

He contemplated his ceiling without seeing it.

The rest of the cyphers were difficult, each in their own way. He’d spent roughly a week parsing what remained of the sequence. One looked like a variant of elliptic curve point multiplication, with the caveat that it wasn’t necessarily an elliptic curve. The second looked less like a cypher and more like a prompt for a solution set to a Navier-Stokes variant describing predicted turbulence in the formation of an event horizon. The third seemed to be a cryptographic hash function. The fourth—

Yes, the fourth.

Or rather, the ninth.

The ninth was tonal.

If only he’d known.

If only he’d worked on that one first.

(Before.)

Before leaving California.

Before coming here.

(Just, before.)

They might’ve done it together. But now—he’d need to dive into Ancient musical structure, what kind of scale they’d employed, conjunct versus disjunct musical forms.

(Conjunct. Their interval structure was conjunct; he’d heard it on Altera: dominated by a D-minor key signature with a sensibility veering into the F Lydian mode in its brighter moments, turning mystic, turning elevated, but returning always to the ache of the A7 dominant pulling toward the tonic.)

But he wasn’t thinking about that now. That’d be a mistake. (A bad one.) He was making a strategy for the other three. The curve and the hash function fell within his competencies, but the fluid dynamics problem—that should go to Perry, with her tack-sharp mind and her background in the mechanics of plasma flow. He’d render it for her.

He could render anything. It was a matter of correctly torquing the insight that’d won him a Millennium Prize problem.

No time like the present.

Except.

He wanted to leave.

He wanted to get out of his apartment with its floor to fuckin’ ceiling windows and its scattered essentials, all on the floor. He wanted to live in a place where the sun didn’t drive so hard day after day after day, a place where it rained.

What had he been thinking? He wasn’t meant to live here, confined to a nameless set of rooms by someone else’s fear. What did they want him for, this “Lucian Alliance?”

What did it mean to be wanted for one’s genetics?

What was happening to Dale Volker?

Rush stood. He pressed his hand against the glass of the window. He was locked inside a clean, white room, consumed by a cryptographic spread, waiting for abduction and torture. 

Beyond the wide expanse of asphalt roads and parking lots, the Rocky Mountains rose brown and dry after a summer without rain.

The cyphers would consume him, but they were his. They were his, and he was theirs. They belonged to one another, they must. Like Colonel Sheppard and his lost city.

In the early hours of the morning, he’d dreamed of Atlantis. A silver pier. A D minor chord. He’d hit golf balls into the sunset.

Odd; he’d never played golf in his life.

Someone knocked on his door.

Young.

The man had turned bloody impossible since Rush’s trip through the gate. He seemed to enjoy holding himself responsible for things outside his control. Rush hadn’t yet decided if that was an admirable quality in an Air Force colonel or whether it showed a tragic lack of discernment, but one downstream consequence had turned very clear:

“You overbearing, type A, hard-charging,” he began, flinging the door wide and bracing a hand on the frame, working himself into a right—

He stopped.

It wasn’t Young.

Vala stood on his doorstep, her (imprudently) large bag slung over her shoulder. She wore sunglasses, jeans, and a Wormhole X-treme branded T-shirt that read: “Dr. Levant Does It with a Lexicon.”

“Hello gorgeous.” She smiled at him. “Don’t stop there.”

“Hello,” he sighed. “Thought you were the colonel.”

She looked expectantly at him.

Rush looked unexpectantly at her.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” She pouted, but her heart didn’t seem in it.

“Hadn’t planned on it, no.” 

“Well,” her tone turned business-like. “I suppose we can do this in the hallway.”

“Do what in the hallway?”

She ducked her head, pulled off her sunglasses, and let her hair fall into her face as she fished the depths of her bag. She came up with a legal pad sporting a CLASSIFIED watermark on every page.

“Not sure you lot have a strong grasp of the word ‘classified’.” Rush took the proffered pad.

“Oh hush,” Vala said. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a pad of paper that doesn’t have ‘classified’ stamped on it?”

“No harder than finding a bookstore,” Rush replied.

“Why would I pay for paper when I live inside a bureaucratic empire built of the stuff?”

“Well reasoned.” Rush scanned the legal pad, which was, front to back, covered in equations.

“Thank you,” Vala said, with only a gloss of her usual hauteur.

He glanced up. Her eyes were red-rimmed, the whites shot through with a laced network of vessels.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Of course,” Vala replied, her smile almost blinding enough to hide her grief. “I have terrible allergies to grass pollen, and levels are high today, according to my adorable little phone. I’m not accustomed to your Earth Plants.”

He lifted a skeptical eyebrow.

“Are you going to look at that?” Vala glanced at the legal-pad filled with math. “Or just stand in your doorway like an artistically disheveled Ambassador of Men’s Dress Shirts?”

That threw him. (As, no doubt, it was intended to). He scanned himself, found nothing that’d qualify as “disheveled” other than his rolled sleeves and his lack of shoes. He switched his attention to Vala. Her demeanor was full of subtle effort, rather than artless flow.

She had the look of a person lacquered together with her own will.

He flipped page after page, skimming through algebra, geometry, trigonometry—

“Would y’like to come in?” he sighed, like the admission of defeat it was.

“Yes,” she replied. “I would.”

Rush stepped back, swung the door with him, then walked away from it. He turned his back on Vala, not in the mood to watch her face as she took in the void of his apartment. He heard her shut the door. Lock it. Slide the latch home. Her steps echoed in rooms without sound-dampening furnishings. But—

“Minimalist,” was all she said.

Rush adjusted his glasses. “Yes well.”

“I approve,” Vala said, cool and spare and without artifice.

“You—approve?” He turned to take her in. 

Vala studied his laptop, his lamp, the assortment of pens and notebooks spread over the floor, the math on his favorite span of wall. Her gaze was frank and full of assessment. “Personal items tie you down,” she said. “Best to have as few as possible. Unless of course, you’re trying to fit into a materialistic society like a native. Then you can buy all the torrid romance novels and body lotion you’d like.” She met his eyes, solemn and serious. “As long as you’re willing to walk away from it all, in the end.”

Rush said nothing.

Vala walked to the window, her eyes on the rise of the Rocky Mountains. “You know what I do recommend though?”

“What?” Rush asked.

“Precious metals and wearable gemstones, gorgeous.” She turned with a smile and a wink. “They’ll hold their value on planet and off. I’ve found a local jeweler who understands my vision. I could set you up.”

Rush lifted a skeptical eyebrow, then studied the math in his hands, tracing minuscule writing that descended in columns over the front and back of each page. She’d filled every available space, as though paper itself was precious.

Maybe, to her, it was.

Number lines and simple algebraic exercises yielded to the basics of factoring, two-dimensional coordinate systems, properties of angles, triangles, parallel lines, the axioms of Euclidean geometry, trigonometric functions, angle transformations, sines, cosines, tangents, the basics of formal proofs, the unit circle. She’d left mistakes intact, notes to herself, references to the texts she’d moved through.

He paused, reseated his glasses, and looked up at her.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“I think y’may not have been entirely forthright when you said you’d had no formal mathematical instruction,” he said dryly.

“Oooh.” Vala slid down the wall next to the window to sit on the bare floor. “Are you flattering me? It’s working. I’m thinking all sorts of wonderful thoughts about you. Keep going.”

He flipped to the beginning and tracked her progress in earnest, studying her mistakes. “I also think,” he said, closing the distance between them, his steps measured and silent over the wood floor, “y’have an inherent talent for spatial relationships.”

Vala smiled up at him, and not all the brightness on display was manufactured.

Rush dropped to the floor.

“You’ve a tendency to rely on graphical methods to solve problems, not a drawback, but—” he looked up at her, frowning, “—what have you got against pi?”

Vala shivered and traced a quick symbol in the air, as though warding something off. “I come from a culture that holds numbers as sacred. I was instructed in their use by someone who had a love for the beautiful and the arcane.” Her tone carried a profound quality beyond the scope of his insight. Or, maybe, beyond the scope of his security clearance.

Rush quirked a brow. “The cult of Pythagoras murdered one of their members for a demonstration of the irrational nature of the square root of two.”

“Makes sense,” Vala said sagely.

Rush smiled faintly at her. “It’s an apocryphal tale. Don’t let superstition hold you back.”

“It’s a tough ask,” Vala admitted. “The Goa’uld—”

He glanced up sharply.

She gave him a rueful look. “Surely your introduction to the SGC included an overview?”

“It did,” he admitted, reevaluating on the fly, “but your involvement—”

“Oh, no need to worry, my Divine Burden is long gone,” Vala said businesslike and brusque atop a deeper sadness. “Fully human over here, thanks to liberation by the Tok’ra. Nevertheless, instincts about pi and phi and e remain.”

“Opinions on irrational constants differ?” Rush asked, intrigued.

“Oh yes. Pi, unapproximated, is the stuff of Eldritch Horror. Phi is intensely popular. e’s favored by the God of Death and Decay. You know how it is.”

“Hmm. Wait until y’get to set theory.”

“What’s ‘set theory’?” Vala asked.

“A branch of mathematics dedicated to describing groups of things.”

“Sounds—well, I won’t lie to you, gorgeous, it sounds a bit boring.”

“Incorrect.” Rush smiled faintly.

“You’re terribly sure of yourself over there.” Vala closed her red-rimmed eyes.

“Yes well,” Rush replied, “this is my profession.”

Vala smiled, her eyes still shut. “Have you really done this,” she whispered, “for your whole life?”

“What?” Rush asked quietly. “Mathematics?”

She nodded.

“For most of it.”

“And you chose it?”

“Yes,” Rush replied.

“I have a daughter,” Vala said.

He wasn’t sure what to say in the presence of a categorical informational spike like the one she’d just thrown. He didn’t understand their conversational trajectory. Where it had come from. Where it might go.

“Her name is Adria,” Vala continued.

“That’s a nice name.”

“It is, isn’t it? She’s horrible. Trying to destroy this galaxy, actually.”

Rush said nothing.

Vala said nothing.

Rush said nothing.

Vala said nothing.

“Ah,” Rush said.

Vala laughed, high and torn. “Oh I know, gorgeous; there’s no need to make that diplomatic face.”

“No, it’s—how old does one have to be to destroy a galaxy?” Rush asked.

“Ah. She doesn’t “age” in the conventional sense, as she’s mostly divine. Demonic.” Vala sighed. “I’m sure you don’t have the security clearance for this; I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Don’t tell your neighbor. I just—she’s not wholly demonic, you know? She’s got my appearance, my drive for advantage—and I can see echoes of what she might have been if she wasn’t mostly vengeful energy with a human-flavored candy shell.” Vala paused, surprised, maybe, by the tear that escaped her eye.

Her math in his hands, he gave her a sympathetic look.

She glared it down. “I never wanted a child’ why would I ever bring something new into a universe like this one? This planet is the only place I’ve ever been that allows basic self-determination, and even here it’s not universal—you have those who are destitute, those who spend all their resources to secure their next meal, those who are discriminated against, those trapped by hierarchical social order, but still.” Her voice faded to nothing. “Still. There are mathematicians.”

“What happened?” Rush asked. “Something must have happened.”

“This week, you mean?” Vala smiled, but there was no brilliance in it, only hulled out exhaustion. “One hundred thousand Jaffa were killed. Their nation was fractured. My daughter destroyed an Ancient temple of unparalleled religious and scientific import that contained the only weapon we might’ve used against her. She nearly murdered Daniel while I watched.”

“Ah,” Rush said, out of his depth and his security clearance.

“I’m sorry.” Vala angled her face toward the window and the afternoon sun fell on her hair. “I didn’t come here for this.”

“What did you come for?” he asked.

“I came here for approval to progress to calculus.”

“Y’need no such thing,” he said, “but it’s yours anyway.”

“Glad to hear it.” She smiled at him, real and exhausted. “I acquired a book.”

“Do y’have it with you?”

Vala dragged a weighty textbook from her bag and handed it over.

Rush took it. The book’s cover featured a violin. Light gleamed off the elegant curve of the c-bout, while its f-hole, deep and dark, suggested an integral symbol. Unbraced as he was, the image was piercing.

“What is it?” Vala asked, soft and concerned.

“Nothing.” He opened the cover, flipped to the table of contents, and ran a finger over the chapter titles as he read. He closed the book without looking at it. “After this, it’ll get interesting.”

“It’s already interesting,” Vala replied.

“Good.” He returned the book, cover down.

She reached a hand into her bag, elbow deep. With a clank and clatter suggesting a variety of small metallic objects sliding past one another, she created space for the textbook and slid it inside. “How are you, gorgeous?” Vala asked. “Your little offworld adventure is all the rage at SGC water coolers.”

“Is it?” Rush asked.

“Well, it would be if the SGC had water coolers. You know what I mean. People are saying the mission was a bust.”

“Yes well.” Rush readjusted his glasses. “Real world applications of quantum phenomena are few and far between. I suspect there’ll be a bit of a learning curve.”

“I’ve also heard that you and Dr. Perry haven’t met in a week.” Vala idly fingered the ends of her hair. “I’ve heard neither of you have made any follow-up attempts to solve whatever problem it was that you ran into.”

“We’re regrouping.” Rush tried for casual, but collapsed to defensive. (It was turning into a problem.)

“Then I’d suggest an effort to look like it, hmm?”

“Why so interested?” Rush clawed his way into an approximation of equilibrium.

“That’s the spirit,” Vala said. “And carry that mace.”

“No.”

“I don’t understand your resistance to this.” Vala sighed.

He couldn’t explain it to her; he could barely explain it to himself. He didn’t want to think of it or discuss it, whatever lived under the veneer of civilization, which was a veneer of choice, of peer-to-peer implicit trust settings, of rising above one’s genetics and one’s nature. He wouldn’t be dragged back into a world where survival was paramount, where hierarchy derived from strength and chance rather than from merit. He’d spent his childhood that way. That was enough.

“No,” he said. “Y’don’t.”

Vala studied him silently.

Rush wondered how much she understood of his unvocalized sentiment.

“All right,” she said finally. “No mace. But have you considered aikido?”

He quirked an eyebrow.

“Just a thought,” Vala said. “Teal’c has taken it up. Tired of doing so much damage with that body of his, I assume.”

“You’re incorrigible,” Rush said.

“And I hear you’re ‘a lot of work’,” Vala replied. “Personally, I don’t see it.”

He’s alone. Running at night. He keeps a measured pace.

His steps ring on a silvered path that catches and reflects the light of a crescent moon. To one side, a limned city glows at its edges, at home under a star-scattered sky. On the other side, the sea stretches to the horizon. Light glitters off the water. He sees and hears the waves that break against the quay. In the foundations of his mind, he senses the water striking naquadah alloy. Energy striking form.

A sea breeze blows through his hair.

His steps slow. He looks out to sea. He can’t hear anything but the night wind and the waves, but there’s more to perceive. He’s sure of it. Something structural. A resonant frequency. A vibration in the panels beneath his feet. He kneels. He presses a palm to the silver path—

Rush snapped awake. Surrounded by sunlight and soaked in sweat.

Disoriented, he brought his hands to his face. It was meant to be night, wasn’t it? He wasn’t meant to be here—where was here? The glare of the light cut to something more reasonable. He dropped his hands and stared through the glass above him, where an edge of cloud covered the sun. He was—hearing something.

A resonant echo.

A pounding in his head and, maybe, in the world.

Hang on.

Right. That was the door.

He pushed himself to his knees, then to his feet, barely able to see past the pain of a photosensitive headache and the way his vision tried to gray itself to nothing. How long had he been lying there? Was it still Wednesday? He should make an effort to track the days, especially in the absence of the cyclical order imposed by the structure of the workweek.

Maybe he’d notch the wall.

He leaned into the frame of the door and opened it.

His brain, not wholly booted up, looked at Young and said, “Vala?”

Young regarded him with stoic disapproval.

“Was here earlier,” Rush said, course-correcting admirably.

Still, Young said nothing. He stood there: uniformed, well-groomed, orderly, accessorizing with a stick (a cane).

Rain began to patter against the windows.

Rush leaned a little harder into the doorframe, brought a hand to the side of his head, squinted at Young, and said, “What are y’doing here?”

“Right now?” Young replied, all his colonelness on full display, “I’m waiting.”

“F’r what?” Rush asked.

“For you to pass out, hotshot.”

Rush frowned. “Don’t think that’ll happen.”

“If it does,” Young said, all dark authority and brick-wall promise, “you’re spending a night in the base infirmary.”

“I jus’ woke up,” Rush clarified. “I need coffee.”

“No you don’t,” Young growled.

“Did you want something?” Rush asked, operating far behind the leading edge of the conversational curve.

“Dinner?”

That cleared up some temporal ambiguities. “Is it Wednesday,” Rush asked, “or Thursday?”

“It’s Tuesday,” Young said slowly.

Probably it’d always been Tuesday.

Wordlessly, Rush nodded.

“C’mon.” Young stepped back. “I got us tacos.”

“No y’fuckin’ didn’t.”

“I’m pretty committed to the idea,” Young said, “but since there’s still a chance you decide to make something infinitely better, I haven’t wasted any resources. Yet.”

There was no question about it; Young’s conversational skills were improving.

“Fuckin’ call fuckin’ Jackson or some other bastion of normativity t’keep you company. I’m busy.”

“Jackson isn’t all that normal,” Young said, “but I’ll admit he fakes it like a champ. Are you annoyed I ditched you for dinner yesterday? I told you I had a meeting.”

Rush now had enough contextual information to pin himself down on Definitely Wednesday, by which he meant Actually Tuesday, at a time between five and seven PM. He’d slept between three and five hours rather than something like twenty-seven or twenty-nine hours.

(Right?)

His headache, his disorientation, and his emerging disbelief at the idea that Young thought he’d be annoyed at being left to his own devices for a day were all combining to impede his deductive efficiency, but—

He’d slept more than usual. Dreamed of Atlantis. His mind felt like it was grinding on code a layer or two deep to his conscious awareness. 

“You okay?” Young asked, unnecessarily slowly.

“Yes yes,” Rush replied. “I’m fine.”

Young tucked his chin and fixed Rush with a paradoxical look from beneath lowered brows that somehow hit as vulnerable and authoritative. “Dinner?”

Rush sighed.

“Good choice.” Young stepped back. “Grab your stuff.”

Rush quirked an eyebrow.

“Phone?” Young prompted. “Signal scrambler? Laptop?”

“I don’t require computational assistance to make you dinner.”

“Yeah, but you’ll want it.”

“I’m not staying,” Rush said, dark look, darker tone.

“Relax about it. If you have two seconds to rub together, your laptop makes an appearance.”

Previous experience would seem to bear Young out.

Rush favored Young with a professorial glare over the tops of his glasses. “One moment.”

He shut the door in the middle of Young’s exasperated pull of his name. He located his phone, signal scrambler, and laptop in short order. When he reopened the door, he found Young leaning into the wall.

“There a reason you won’t let me into your apartment?” the colonel growled.

“Do I need one?” Rush pulled his door closed, thousands of dollars of technology pinned between his arm and hip.

“No, I’m just pretty sure you have one.”

“I don’t let anyone in,” Rush replied.

“Not a bad instinct, given your security status.” Young leaned into his cane as they walked down the hall. “Doubt the real reason makes that much sense.” 

Rush shrugged artlessly.

Young snorted.

Between the cloud cover and fading evening light, the colonel’s apartment was blessedly dim. Rain tapped against the windows.

Rush tripped over a box of books near the door. He saved it. 

Well, Young and the wall saved it in equal parts.

(He saved his armful of electronics.)

“Watch out,” Young said, one hand locked around Rush’s elbow.

“Thought you were meant to be done with this.” Rush eyed the offending box with disapproval.

“That box is full of stuff that isn’t mine.” Young let him go.

Rush deposited his collection of electronic devices on Young’s coffee table, then collapsed to the couch, pressing his fingertips into his temples. 

“You sure you’re okay, hotshot?” Young shut the door.

He felt like his skull was being pried open with a tool manufactured by primitive man.

(This wasn’t an unusual state for him.) 

“I need coffee,” he said.

“You sure? Because I think you need a ten day nap and some soup.” Young looked down at him in poorly concealed amusement.

“Coffee,” Rush repeated.

“C’mon then.” Young limped in the direction of his kitchen.

Rush followed, one hand pressed to the side of his head.

Raindrops chased one another down the pane of the kitchen window.

“So,” Young said, an overtone to the reassuring sound of the coffee maker. “Jackson tells me you’re legit famous.”

“Does he?” Rush asked, unwilling to scan Young’s cabinets for culinary inspiration before being presented with evidence that the portion of his headache made up from caffeine-withdrawal would come to an end in the near future.

“Oh yeah. At least as famous as some other math guy I’d never heard of,” Young said.

(Andrew Wiles, most likely.)

“Oh good.” Rush squinted at him.

“P=NP?” Young said, like he was saying hello in a foreign language for the first time in his life.

“It does,” Rush sighed.

“Jackson says people don’t yet fully understand the implications of your work, but that it’s already turning information security on its head, and it’ll increase the efficiency of computational representations of—stuff.”

(Cyphers for video games, as an example.)

“Yes,” Rush said dully, “I’m sure it will.”

“Not gonna lie to you hotshot, I have no idea what kind of ‘stuff,’ and I don’t think Jackson was too clear on it either.” Young handed him a cup of coffee.

Rush took the cup, shut his eyes, and fought the urge to cry.

(Probably it was the headache. Probably it was the proof. Probably it was someone making him coffee on a rainy evening in the middle of a desert.)

“What I wanna know,” Young continued, not noticing or pretending not to notice, “is how jealous the academic math community is that the most hotshot of all math hotshots is making me dinner.”

Rush braced himself, rallied, opened his eyes. “Depends on whether they’re personally acquainted with me. Envy’ll be inversely proportional to degree of acquaintance, you’ll find.”

Young took some time parsing Rush’s claim, then said, “Yeah, but do any of them know about the culinary skill set you’ve got on you?”

“No,” Rush admitted. Coffee in hand, he tried not to have any thoughts. Other than headache and dinner. 

He opened the refrigerator. The combination of cold air and hot coffee was dissonant. Welcome.

“So, I’m gonna go with the idea that I’m the envy of mathematicians everywhere.”

“An unimpressively small subset of academia that’s less prone to envy than most,” Rush replied. “Plus, as a group, they trend more toward asceticism than hedonism.”

Young sighed. “Let me have this?”

Rush smiled faintly. “You’d net greater proportional and absolute envy if you switch fields. I recommend Computer Science.” 

“So—I’m the envy of computer scientists everywhere?”

“If you say so.”

Young snorted.

Rush, possessed of an emerging meal plan, began a more directed search of Young’s refrigerator.

“What’s for dinner?”

“Watermelon bisque,” Rush decided, “paired with—” he angled his head to read the label on the butcher paper on the top shelf, “—trout. Vala buys local, I see.” 

“How do you know it was Vala?” Young protested. “I could’ve bought that fish.”

“The only things you buy are alcohol and ‘frozen pizza’ of deplorable quality. Plus, the woman’s in the honeymoon phase of a love affair with capitalism and nothing brings her greater joy than using Jackson’s credit card.”

Young snorted. “Yeah, okay. It was Vala. But it wasn’t Jackson’s card. I hired her to do my shopping.”

Rush looked up. “Did you really?”

“Hotshot, I don’t have the imagination to stock a fridge for a culinary genius of your caliber.” Young fought down a smile.

Rush did his best to look neither surprised nor pleased.

“Vala knows an opportunity when she sees one,” Young continued, “and nothing makes her happier than spending time in supermarkets.”

Rush took a sip of his coffee. “Jackson should take her to a real city. San Francisco. Seattle. Las Vegas. Somewhere beyond this glorified strip mall.”

“Yeah, but the man’s about as sharp as a wooden spoon when it comes to those kinds of things, I think,” Young said.

“That,” Rush replied, slow and arch, “or acutely aware and acutely terrified.”

“Maybe,” Young admitted.

Never above pressing a point of weakness when presented with one, Rush drew a chef’s knife from a nearby drawer. “Speaking of things that are dull—”

“Hey,” Young said. “Watch yourself, hotshot.”

“—your knives,” Rush continued smoothly, “are unacceptable. Send your personal shopper out after a high quality set of cutlery.” He positioned the whole watermelon in the center of the cutting board.

“I’ll think about it.” Young retrieved a beer from the refrigerator. “You want a drink?”

Rush put his back into bisecting a whole watermelon with a dull knife. When the fruit had been halved he shook out his arm, glanced up at Young, and asked, “Do I seem the kind of person who would enjoy—” Rush glanced at the bottle Young held, “—Coors Light?”

“I’ve got wine,” the colonel said.

“Who chose it?” Rush asked. “You or Vala?”

Young snorted.

Rush started in on quartering the watermelon.

“Keep in mind, it’s been heavily implied she’s an alien,” Young said. “I’m not confirming or denying, just pointing out she likes herself a weird-ass cocktail.”

“Hmm.” Rush forced a dull blade through ripe fruit.

“You remember that thing,” Young continued. “Admit it. You only claimed to like it because you’re a contrarian.”

“I’ll admit I’m astonished you know the word ‘contrarian’,” Rush shook out his aching hand, “and nothing else.” He took a sip of coffee.

“It’s a Chablis,” Young said, “and I’m not telling you who bought it.”

Rush said nothing. He was undecided. A cost/benefit analysis of drinking wine under these particular circumstances yielded no clear outcome. In the “benefits” column: he approved of the fish/watermelon/wine trifecta from a culinary, cultural, and aesthetic perspective; and then there was the strong suspicion that if he decided to drink wine, Young would likely switch away from beer, which would be a huge positive because pairing a white fish and watermelon bisque with Coors Light was a fuckin’ vexation. In the “costs” column: yes well, he didn’t care to delineate the costs column, as potential costs were poorly defined but profoundly steep, hinging on his true feelings about the arrangement he’d fallen into with the colonel down the hall.

It was full of tacit assumptions.  

“Okay, well,” Young said, (extremely transparent, overly casual), “you let me know when you decide, hotshot.”

Rush flipped a quarter of the watermelon. Flesh-side down, he cut away the rind with a tragically dull knife. “I think you should switch to Chablis,” he said, quite truthfully. 

“Maybe I will.” Young gave him a speculative look and reached up to open a cabinet. His expression tightened as the motion strained his back. He pulled out a glass, filled it with water, and set it on the counter next to Rush. “Drink that, and I’ll switch to wine if this bisque materializes before you pass out.”

“If by ‘materializes’ you mean ‘is flawlessly and competently constructed’.” Rush removed the rind and set it aside, then went to work on the next quarter.

“Yup,” Young said. “That. You eat and drink more than once a day, right?”

“On average, I’m certain that’s true.” Rush finished rinding the watermelon, then started cubing. Pink-tinged juice leaked off the edges of the cutting board.

The rain pattered against the windows.

Young sauntered over and stole a cube of watermelon from the accumulating pile. “You’re handy with a knife.”

“Yes. Imagine what I could do with a well-maintained blade,” Rush replied.

“It’s probably better if I don’t,” Young said, trying to hang onto his stoic demeanor, mostly failing.

“Agreed. Just fuckin’ buy one.”

“You got it, hotshot.”

Rush rolled his eyes, sampled a cube of watermelon (sweet-grained and sugared with the height of summer), then transferred dripping cubes of fruit to the waiting blender.

“Tell me,” he said, rinsing his hands and Young’s chef’s knife. “How’s the galaxy these days?”

“Going to shit. Why do you ask?” Young stole another cube of watermelon, his good hip braced against the counter.

“Oh, no reason.” Rush dried the knife, pried a clove of garlic away from the bulb and placed it beneath the flat of his blade. He pressed down.

“You hear something about it?” Young asked.

The clove cracked. The smell of garlic filled the air, familiar and sharp. Rush peeled the clove and began mincing. “I’m shut in a set of rooms all day. Where am I going to hear anything?”

“The galaxy’s been better,” Young admitted. “No secret there. At least not from a guy-with-level-one-security-clearance.”

“I feel I should, at a minimum, be level two.” Rush transferred the garlic to the blender, pulsed the mixture to create a bit of space, then pulled a courgette from the fridge. 

“You’re not the only one,” Young said. “McKay petitioned the SGC to up your clearance.”

“McKay?” Rush echoed, already peeling the courgette. 

“He wants to gate-skype with you,” Young said. “Well, either he does, or Sheppard does. Not sure which. They tend to front for each other. Drives Homeworld Command crazy.”

Rush paused, his knife positioned over the peeled courgette, thinking, for some reason of Colonel Sheppard’s still profile against a sea of moving grass bleached by sunlight that never forgot it came from a star.

“Hotshot?” Young asked.

Rush shook himself. Started chopping. “Is that likely to happen? Level two security clearance?”

“You never know. Jackson’s in your corner, so there’s at least a small chance. but then,” Young paused. “Jackson’s always been in your corner.”

“Has he?” Rush asked.

“Yeah.”

Rush added his chopped courgette to the blender, experimentally pulsed the blades, then started blending in earnest. It still needed a dash of lemon juice. Olive oil. Cilantro, maybe. 

Young motioned at him, then held up his phone, alight with an incoming call.

Rush killed the blender.

“Emily,” Young said, compressing a three-syllable name to two. “Hey.”

Rush picked up his coffee and downed the remains of the cup in a one-er. His headache was trending away from craniotomy levels and toward something more manageable.

Rush located a lemon. And cilantro. He pulled the paper-wrapped trout from the fridge.

“Yeah,” Young said. “They’re packed up. One box.”

Baking seemed easiest. He decided he’d improvise a watermelon-based salsa to complement the bisque. He began preheating the oven. 

“Now?” Young asked. “I have dinner plans.”

“No, y’really don’t,” Rush called over his shoulder, unwrapping the fish.

Young glared at him. “No, it’s uh. With a coworker. A scientist working on the project I— Yeah. At my place. No.”

Rush quirked a brow at Young, who seemed to be getting an earful on the other end of the line.

Young scowled at him.

“No,” Young said emphatically. “No. It’s nothing like that. At all. Now is good. Now is fine. Come on up.” He hung up the phone.

“Soooooo,” Rush began delicately.

Young shot him a look of naked steel rebar.

“Even I didn’t buy your argument, and I’m here.” Rush placed the fish into a glass baking pan, then drizzled the pan with olive oil. “Participating.”

Young sighed, watching Rush grind fresh-cracked pepper onto the trout. “Yeah. This is the most romantic dinner I’ve had in half a decade,” he said morosely.

Rush, heroically, swallowed his amusement. “She’s coming up now?”

“She’s five minutes out.” Young pocketed his phone. “We’re exchanging personal items.”

“I see.” Rush sprinkled flaked salt over the fish, then setting it aside while the oven continued to heat. “So she gets her three copies of Sense and Sensibility, and you get—what? Tell me it’s a food processor. Or a whetstone.”

“I doubt it,” Young said glumly.

“I concur,” Rush said. “You ended up with the lesser half of a marginally adequate kitchen. Would you like me to leave? I’d be happy to oblige.”

“Are you kidding me?” Young asked. “No. Now you have to stay. I already told her you were here, and it’ll look suspicious if I’m cooking an elaborate dinner for two in an empty apartment, especially given the fact that I don’t cook. Watermelon bisque? C’mon.”

“We could invite her to dinner?”

“No,” Young said. “No.”

“Are y’trying t’reestablish your relationship?”

“No.” Young’s voice cracked. 

“I agree now would be too early to attempt it, but, eventually,” Rush began, half curious, half deliberately torturing his charmingly flustered neighbor, “y’learn to cook a meal, speak intelligently about wine…” he trailed off suggestively.

“Will you stop talking? Where’s Jackson when you need the guy?”

“You’d best be grateful I’m not Jackson,” Rush countered, dicing shallot for the watermelon salsa. “Jackson would invite your ex-wife to dinner because he is, ostensibly, a human being par excellence and wouldn’t be physically capable of sending her away without some fuckin’ fantastic bisque.”

“Was that ostensibly a human being, or ostensibly ‘par excellence’, or ostensibly both?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know, Rush,” Young growled, arms crossed, unquestionably on the back foot. “That’s why I asked.”

Rush smirked. “The merit of the construction lies in its ambiguity. Obviously.” He restarted the blender, let it run for a few minutes, then killed it. “Gillette,” he said.

“What?” Young asked, flummoxed.

“Laramie,” Rush continued. “Rock Springs.”

Young’s expression shifted from flustered to amused. “Guess again.”

“Sheridan.”

Young shook his head.

“Evanston.”

“You’re not gonna get it, hotshot.”

“Green River.”

“Did you start memorizing the names of Wyoming cities in order of population density?”

“Riverton,” Rush said.

Young snorted. “You declare defeat, and I’ll tell you.”

“Jackson,” Rush continued. “Cody. Rawlins.”

There was a knock on the door.

“C’mon,” Young growled, pushing away from the counter.

“Y’want me to meet her?” Rush asked, surprised.

“Yeah,” Young drawled. “Ideally, this wouldn’t be happening at all, but it’s definitely weirder if there’s a half-dead mathematician in my kitchen cooking bisque behind the scenes.”

“Half-dead?” Rush echoed, rinsing his hands.

“Look in a mirror, hotshot,” Young said over his shoulder, as he limped out of the kitchen.

“I don’t understand what you have against bisque.” Rush put the fish in the oven and followed him out of the kitchen. “Bisque isn’t fuckin’ rare, you know. I’ll grant that making bisque out of watermelon is a perversion of what’s classically meant by ‘bisque,’ but I’m not a culinary historian.”

“Your expectations about my expectations may be the weirdest thing about you.” Young paused next to the door, and looked him over. “That, or your hatred of shoes.”

Before Rush could reply, Young opened the door.

A woman with honey blonde hair stood in the frame, clad in a crisp pink blouse, khaki pants and low heels. She held a cardboard box.

“Hey Em.” Young swung the door wide, practically dripping with anxiety. “I can take that.”  He leaned his cane against the wall and reached for the box she was holding.

“You’d better not.” Emily’s tone was curt. She glanced at the cane, then stepped past Young and into the apartment, her eyes roving the walls, her expression tight and unhappy. She set the box on the end of the couch, then eyed Rush. “Hi.” She extended a hand.

He took it. “Nicholas Rush.”

“Emily Tremblay,” she replied.

Young winced.

She glanced at him. “I told you I was going to change it back.”

“Yeah,” Young said, “I know. I know.”

Rush politely averted his gaze to the frame of the open door.

“How’s your back?” Emily asked. “Your hip?”

“Fine,” Young said. “Good. Getting better.”

“I thought you didn’t need the cane anymore.” She wiped her palms on her pants.

“Little setback,” Young said.

“A setback,” Emily echoed, with more gravity.

There was a prolonged, uncomfortable silence.

Rush tried to work out how he might escape. But then—

“Are you cooking?” Emily angled her head, like she could smell watermelon, crushed garlic, sliced lemon, cut shallot.

“Uh,” Young said, no doubt crushed beneath the cognitive weight of the cost/benefit analyses he was running.

Emily’s gaze fixed on Rush. She scanned him from head to toe in obvious appraisal. Her eyes lingered on his lack of footwear.

He could admit it: the situation was deeply ambiguous and confusing. Young seemed to be collapsing into an overwhelmed morass of indecision. Rush marshaled his (considerable) poise and split multiple differences.

“Would you like to stay?” The sentence arrived like well-poured Chablis, clear and polite with a mineral undertone, steel aged, with a courteously clean finish.

Well played, sweetheart, no one whispered in his ear.

“No thanks,” Emily said, “I have to get going. Enjoy your—” she paused.

“Watermelon bisque.” Young wasn’t able to hide his wince.

Emily looked to Rush, a hint of surprise in her expression. “Watermelon bisque?”

“And local trout.” Rush ran a hand through his hair. “The offer stands.” 

“I can’t,” Emily said, “but thank you.” She glanced at the box near the doorway. “Is that it?”

Young nodded.

She knelt, rifled through its contents and pulled out a book. “This was for you.” She brandished The Girl’s Guide to Everything, then set it on Young’s couch.

“Thanks,” Young said.

“Take care.” She got to her feet and, again, swept her eyes over Rush. “Nice meeting you,” she added, then shot Young a significant look. Intense, silent, crammed with information and judgment.

“Pleasure,” Rush replied, finding an edge in the back half of the word, leaning into it the slightest bit.

Emily stepped into the hall. “I’ll call you,” she said.

“Yeah,” Young agreed, “sounds good.” He shut the door behind her, pressed his forehead into the wood, and groaned.

Rush angled his head and crossed his arms, not sure what this (rather unusual) display of wordless theatricality signaled. The interaction hadn’t gone badly. Far from it, in fact.

“Why today?” Young asked the wood of the door. “Why right now.” He turned to take in Rush. “And you—” the colonel trailed off, too flustered to continue.

“Was I not helpful?” Rush asked, pouring all the artless culture he’d been fermenting for decades into the space between them.

“You weren’t exactly giving off a Guy from Work vibe,” Young growled.

Rush angled his head a little further, telegraphing faux bemusement. “I find—”

Young pointed a finger at him. “Not another word.”

After dinner, his headache receded into a chronic, conquered smolder. Rain tapped against dark window panes. They lingered at the table. 

Rush let it happen. He wasn’t sure why.

It was nice, it was fundamental, it was absolutely bloody crucial that Young shared zero features with his late wife. Everything of her was his alone to bring. He’d built the bones of his communication style around her effortless class, her elegance, the way she handled her bow like a musical rapier, the way she’d skewered conversational opponents but done it lightly, with grace and good humor.

The heart had fallen out of all his skill.

He traced a fingertip down his wine glass.

“What do you think of all of this, hotshot?” Young asked.

“You’ll need to specify,” Rush said, cool-pouring poise for the crack of it.

Young hesitated. There was more than a hint of warmth in his expression. Conflict. Wariness. He caught and held Rush’s gaze. The question had been ambiguous on purpose, Rush suspected.

He sustained the eye contact. Let the charge build.

But he had no strength beyond what he’d already displayed. What he used now.

He dropped his eyes and looked away.

Young cleared his throat. “You’re a smart guy,” he began, “and don’t think I haven’t noticed that you’re aces at getting information out of people. Like Jackson. Like Vala. Hell, Sheppard spent less than a day with you and gave you the server codes to Atlantis.”

Rush quirked an eyebrow.

“You’ve gotta be building a strategic assessment of everything that’s happened over the past few weeks,” Young said. “I’d like to hear it.”

He’d assumed he’d been recruited to navigate the maze woven into the intergalactic transportation system humanity had discovered and appropriated. Recruited to define it, to parse it, to separate it, and to unlock it. Only slowly had the threat of the Lucian Alliance been introduced, though he suspected it’d been there all along, simmering unmentioned as events outside the scope of his knowledge took their course.

“It’s the genetics aspect that bothers me,” Rush admitted. “Why they didn’t tell me, and then—”

“Why someone tipped you?” Young prompted, when he didn’t continue.

“No one ‘tipped’ me,” Rush replied coolly. “As I stated. Repeatedly. In a debriefing that lasted hours. I simply decided—”

“Hotshot.” Young cut him off, “I know someone tipped you. And I know who.”

Rush favored Young with his most icily neutral expression.

Young laid a piece of real information on the table. “It was Jackson. And, for the, record, I think it was the right call. What I’m asking is—why do you think Jackson tipped you.”

“Because I deserve to know. It’s my fuckin’ file, and they’re my fuckin’ genes.”

“Yeah,” Young said, “true, but I’m not sure you realize the risk Jackson ran. The risk Lam ran in handing over your file. Your right to that knowledge had already been denied by the SGC for strategic reasons, but someone within that organization gave it to you anyway. To you, not to anyone else. That astrophysicist—Volker? You think he knew anything about his genes? You think he knew why he lit up red in that LA fog when other people didn’t?” Young leaned back in his chair and draped a casual arm over its back.

Rush fixed his gaze on his wine glass and considered Jackson.

The man had made only a halfhearted effort to recruit him, especially when compared with Telford’s single-minded persistence. Jackson spent most of his conversational energy trying to get Rush to go to Atlantis. He’d told Rush to request his medical file, which had allowed him to deduce the reasons he’d been tagged by the LA compound that had filled the SGC during the recent foothold.

The LA had taken Dale Volker. The man was an astrophysicist with about as much chance of working through the cryptosystems wreathing the gate as Rush had of discovering an exoplanet.

Jackson had revealed Rush’s genetic status as the primary driver of his placement on the LA’s wishlist. He’d also undermined Rush’s peer-to-peer trust settings within the context of the SGC.

That, perhaps, had been the man’s real goal.

“It does beg the question,” Rush began, shifting his gaze to Young, “of when the SGC knew I was positive for all three genes. Before I was identified as a recruitment target, or after?”

“Yup,” Young said, like a man who knew the answer.

“The other obvious question is,” Rush continued, “what’s the utility of having all three genes?”

“Any thoughts about that?” Young asked.

“Compatibility with Ancient technology is the obvious benefit, but there are darker alternatives.”

Young watched him patiently.

If he’d been recruited to the SGC for his genes, and if his genetics were the primary motivator behind the Lucian Alliance’s campaign to abduct him, then perhaps—

Perhaps the goals of the Lucian Alliance and the goals of the SGC were aligned.

Perhaps they wanted him for the same thing.

For some defined task or purpose. 

Something that Jackson feared.

Something that Telford embraced.

“The interests of the Lucian Alliance and the SGC overlap.” He smiled at Young, uneven and rueful, certain this was what the man had been driving at all along. “Don’t they.”

“I think you should seriously consider visiting Atlantis,” Young said.

It wasn’t an answer. All the same, it was answer enough.