Who Me, Touch That?

They're two of a kind.

No matter what anyone else tells you about personalities or likes or dislikes or backgrounds…

They're two of a kind.

They'll whinge and snipe and shout and rant at each other. Sometimes all in the one conversation.

Teal'c's learned how to switch off and not listen. I wish I could do that. Unfortunately, I'm very good at listening to them and they know it. Which is why they complain to me about each other when things get bad between them.

"Daniel!" The Colonel warns as our team-mate reaches out one hand to one of the smaller vases.

The hand snatches back, and blue eyes regards us with mixed annoyance and sheepishness. He's been told time and time again to keep his hands to himself, but Daniel in an ancient burial chamber is like a kid in a toy store. The words 'don't touch' have no meaning to him and even if they did - he'd just forget himself.

I run my eyes over the walls. It's beautiful - like walking into a miniature version of the Sistine Chapel. Frescoes and paintings and pictures all over the walls. Painted with exquisite care, and hidden from the harsh light of day and the touch of anything but spiders for hundreds of years.

Okay, I probably know more about the chemical composition of the paint than I do about art, but I know beauty when I see it, and this…is beautiful.

"…wonder if they have any histories about. We could see how these people got transplanted to this place… what kind of background they had… their history and culture…"

The Colonel heaves a big sigh and rolls his eyes for me to see.

As far as Daniel is concerned, the fascination is that the style of the pictures is Renaissance, but the burial chamber with all the possessions and figurines is Ancient Egypt. A curious synthesis of two different styles that are thousands of years apart in Earth terms and probably diverged at the point where the people who lived here were brought here by the Goa'uld.

I'm interested, yes, but I'd be much more interested if I found a sketch book by an Egyptian-Renaissance Michelangelo or a Leonardo da Vinci of this culture. History is appealing to me in terms of the society's level of technological advancement. For Daniel, it's the other way around.

Keeping his hands to himself right now is torture, so he's thinking out loud.

Teal'c and I listen, while the Colonel scowls.

For the Colonel, having to listen to Daniel babble on is torture. It's not that he doesn't understand, but that he chooses not to understand. If he ever tells you he's 'just a soldier', then just nod and ignore it. The man is quite happily lying to you in word and deed whether he knows it or not.

Meanwhile, Daniel is video recording a section of the wall where the pictures show repeating themes of a woman and a boy. The boy starts off as a baby, but grows to be a man; the early pictures show the woman leading the baby, but when the man is grown, the images are of him leading her and other people. "This is amazing! The content of the painting is middle ages religious iconoclasm - Madonna and Christ, but the style is Renaissance… On Earth by the time they reached the renaissance, image content had moved away from religious depictions…and that doesn't even begin to address the whole 'origins of Christianity' question this will bring up… Hey, look at this!" He reaches out for a small statuette.

"Daniel!"

Fingers stop just short of touching the graceful carving of the woman. "Oh, yeah…sorry, Jack. But it's just like one of those little shrine statues down in Mexico, or South America…" He looks over the room again, "It's an incredible find…"

"And there's the whole rest of the city still to see," the Colonel grumbles.

Next thing I know, he'll be demanding 'Are we there yet?'

I shine my torch across the walls and notice something unusual, "Daniel, this section of the chamber has indents in the walls…see the shadows…"

"Don't touch them!"

I give the Colonel an amused and reproving glance. I'm not Daniel, after all. His return gaze is a 'What? What did I say?' look.

There's a whole set of them - indents about the width of two of my fingers all over the wall. Knowing that the Colonel is about to bark at Daniel again, I pull our team-mate a couple of steps back. "Sam!"

"We can study it just as well from here as from there, Daniel," I tell him firmly.

"It's a repeating pattern," he points out. "Eight rows…"

"Thirteen indents across - but what about the positioning."

"Down, up, down, up, down, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, down…"

"The same through all eight rows…"

"Some kind of a…calculator…maybe…"

"In base thirteen?" I make a face. "And why have eight rows?"

"Maybe it's a connect-the-dots puzzle," drawls the Colonel behind us. I turn my head, smiling at his misplaced humour.

"It'd be a pretty boring picture."

"MajorCarter, what do you mean by base thirteen?"

"Teal'c, our counting system is based on the number ten. Every number we have is based on the number of tens, hundreds, thousands, and so on, in it. It's possible to count in bases other than ten - computers count in binary which is also known as base two. There's only ones and zeros in binary, although some specially-designed computers count in octal, which is base eight…" The Colonel coughs, raising his eyebrows at me and I hastily add, "Perhaps these people counted in thirteens instead of tens…"

"But why the two levels of dots on each row? Five up, eight down - and the two points where there are two dots down side-by-side…"

I frown as I walk back long the length of the wall, and suddenly the row of indents level with my eye looks vaguely familiar.

"Looks like some kind of a computer keyboard…" Daniel grins suddenly, "For someone with eight arms?"

"That's it! A keyboard! It's music."

The Colonel's eyebrows jump, "Music?" His expression contains a great deal of scepticism.

"Well, a musical instrument. Thirteen indents - one for each of the Western chromatic scale."

He shoots a look at Daniel who returns him a mystified look, and I grin.

Daniel's out of his league here, and he knows it. When it comes to types of music for an ancient culture or the different kinds of instruments used for individual purposes over the world, he would have no difficulty identifying what they are - but actual music itself…

"What do you know about music, Carter?"

I grin. "Music and mathematics are closely related, sir. Left and right sides of the brain." Not that I can sing, mind you, just that the background of music is grounded in mathematics or physics: the compression frequency of airwaves to produce sound and the variation in vibration frequency according to the changing ratio of a plucked string.

"Ah-ah-ah!" He holds up one hand, evidently desiring to hear no more about it.

Teal'c's curiosity, however, is piqued. "What is a chromatic scale, MajorCarter?"

How to explain the basis of Western music to a Jaffa whose abilities do not include singing?

"Do you know what an octave is, Teal'c?"

"No, I imagine he doesn't, Carter," sighs the Colonel. "I certainly don't." Patient exasperation is clear in his expression. "But I'm sure that you're about to tell us, right?"

I'm taken aback for a moment, before I see the gleam in his eyes. It's one of his 'lay down the gauntlet' challenges: can I explain a concept to him without drowning him in what he terms 'techno-babble'? This is going to be a challenge. Mentally rolling up my sleeves, I patiently explain to the two men the background of the Western musical scale in terms they'll understand.

Teal'c listens silently on the other side, merely absorbing the information, while the Colonel asks questions and Daniel wanders through the chamber, getting the pictures and the indents on the video camera.

"So after seven other notes…"

"Technically twelve, sir."

"Alright, twelve of these…shimmy-tones…"

"Semitones."

"Whatever. After twelve of them you get back to the same note, only higher?"

"Yes, sir."

"And they still manage to produce something as tricky to sing as 'The Star-Spangled Banner'?"

"Yes, sir."

"Amazing."

"O'Neill, I believe that DanielJackson has finished recording this chamber."

"Great! We've got a whole four hours to look at the rest of the…"

He stops mid-sentence, and I glance over to see what caused the abrupt finish.

Daniel's studying the 'keyboard' wall again. One hand is raised and the expression on his face is intent and curious. He's about to touch one of the 'keys'. Just to see what it does.

As a general rule, cultures are sensitive about their dead - specifically about the resting places of their dead. Especially since a lot of the goods of the deceased were frequently left with the corpse to 'accompany them into the next life'. As the Colonel observed in an artefact-crammed tomb on P8Z-334, not a lot of ancient cultures got the hang of the phrase: 'You can't take it with you'. The excess of goods usually meant people who wanted to steal them. The possibility of thieves meant the designers of most tombs and burial structures of the ancient world left some nasty 'surprises' for those who would seek to plunder the possessions of the deceased.

That's not even counting the likelihood of some kind of contact-borne disease having stored itself down here for hundreds of thousands of years, just waiting for someone to come along and contract it, and spread it out in the daylight world. While we in the Western world have been generally free of plagues for the last hundred years or so, in travelling off-world through the Stargate, we've been made very aware of the potential for infectious things to come through the gate - either in the artefacts we return with, or in the form of infected people.

Of course, none of that occurs to Daniel.

The Colonel and I both bark his name at the same time as curious fingers reach out to brush the 'keyboard'…

"Daniel!"

The hand jerks back, and Daniel gives us all a sheepish grin.

Who me? says the grin, Touch that?

The Colonel thumps his head against Teal'c's shoulder.

*

We got back home without further drama. Daniel wanted to stay, the Colonel wanted to go. They argued. The Colonel won.

Back through the gate; debriefing with Daniel's complaints and the Colonel's grumbles; post-gate inspection, locker room showers; into lab, shut door.

Once in the peace of my own lab, I sigh with relief. The bickering was getting on my nerves.

I envy Teal'c his stoicism. There are days when I have this urge to scream at both the Colonel and Daniel. I'd love to see their reactions if I did! I haven't yet, of course. But one of these days…

I've just settled down for a bit of light reading when the door opens and the Colonel prowls in.

He rarely knocks. He just assumes that you'll be overjoyed to see him. Or maybe he's just afraid of being told to stay out.

"Sir?"

"I'm trying to put off having to write those reports, Carter."

"It's always nice to know that my lab is more interesting than reports, sir." He wanders around, running his fingers lightly over dust-covered computer banks and I watch him for a moment, before looking back to my light reading. I don't start reading again because in a minute he'll begin to talk. He'll roam around the room, start prodding the various 'doohickeys' on my workbenches, then start asking questions and expect me to be able to answer them.

"Daniel's already petitioned to return with SG-9 when they go back to P7S-512." The Colonel sounds a little disgruntled.

"It is an incredible find from an archaeological perspective." I try to find a parallel he could understand. "Like going up against Kurdish rebels, and discovering they've got weapon technology equal to our own." As analogies go, it's not very good.

"They probably got it off the Iraqi black market," he snorts.

"Probably. But you'd want to know for sure, wouldn't you, sir? That's what Daniel wants to know. How the culture we found retained the Egyptian traditions, while developing complex three-dimensional figure painting, and Anglo-Catholic symbolism."

He makes another snorting sound and keeps drifting. I look back at the paper and a phrase catches my eye: …conversion of matter to energy with the application of transporting objects across large distances… I start reading avidly, and only when I get to the end of the introduction do I realise that the Colonel has been awfully quiet for the last minute. No questions or complaints. Just silence.

I turn around and catch him standing before a new device SG-9 spotted on their last planet and brought back.

His hand hovers over the contraption.

He's about to flip a little lever on it. Just to see what it does.

The lever he's going to touch is more or less the 'on' button. After SG-9 did some 'hands-on experimentation' with the device they discovered it to be a force-field generator with a remote control. When the device is switched on, it creates a spherical shield that can be enlarged up to twenty-four feet or shrunk down to five feet depending on the settings of the dials on the generator box. To be 'recognised' by the shield and able to move in and out of it, you need to be wearing one of the rings found in a little compartment on the generator, otherwise the shield will push you out of it's radius, exerting force on the body equivalent to the power output of the shield moving at the velocity of the shield expansion.

In terms that the Colonel would understand: significant force.

Lieutenant Killarney of SG-9 discovered this the painful way. He's presently in the infirmary with an expected stay of at least two weeks.

The Colonel is about to emulate the Lieutenant.

The shield will expand about five feet in less than a second, hitting him in the face with all the force of a steel plate. It will break his nose and fling him across the room up against the computer systems, giving him a concussion as his head hits the shelf which is precisely the right height to take him in the back of the skull. The remote, sitting on the top of the machine, will be encased by the shield generator, unreachable. Without it, we have no way of turning the shield off, and it will take me one whole day of work to develop a new remote.

Of course, that doesn't occur to the Colonel.

"Sir!" I bark at him as the fingers reach out to the switch…

He yanks his hand back and gives me a grin.

Who me? says the grin, Touch that?

Oh, they're two of a kind.

*