Author: Hypatia Kosh
Disclaimer: Babylon 5 and Stargate belong to other people. No money is being made out of this story.
Rating: G
Recipient: Hobsonphile
Series: Babylon 5/Stargate SG-1
I am, at the end, a failure.
I wish things had gone differently. I wish so many had not had to die. I wish it was only we who bore the punishment for our hubris--we, the crew of the Icarus.
I won't apologize for my curiosity. I'm a scientist, and expanding human knowledge is what scientists do.
I can't even apologize for being wrong. We don't learn about the world in that neat historical progression they feed children in textbooks. Science history is a story of meandering, false turns, lost notes and simultaneous discoveries--and I find it fascinating.
When I was a child, I became enthralled by Egyptian hieroglyphics, the special priestly language which spoke secrets about ancient kings, the gods, and the journeys of the dead.
I loved it, all of it. I studied to become an archeologist. Xenoarcheology was too new a field for a separate degree program ten years ago when I was going through, but I sought out as much information as I could find about the ancient spacefaring civilizations of our galaxy. You see, by that time I had become convinced that Egyptian culture contained a record of human-alien contact far more ancient than the occasional Streib incursions Earth was subject to in the centuries before first contact with the Centauri.
It's a very old hypothesis in archeology--older, in some sense, than archeology itself. Ancient cultures which could not conceive of a time before history imagined that the gods themselves had taught human beings the crafts of weaving and pottery and animal husbandry.
It was humans who discovered how to do those things, however. We did it on our own. And for that reason the thought--the evidence, really, I would assert--of alien contact in our ancient history was distrusted. The most ardent supporters of the theory were racists who could not understand how or why the native peoples of Peru created the Nazca lines, or the Egyptians and Mesoamericans built pyramids.
One might as well ask why St. Louis built the Gateway Arch, or the Catholics St. Peter's, or why even now Earth is colonizing Mars.
No, for me the quest was more subtle, drawn by a riddle inked upon ancient papyri, a holy grail that I might yet grasp.
So of course I went, even though our mission was corporate-funded. As long as good research was going to be done, I didn't care too much if our backers intended to collect what some people consider to be valuable artifacts and sell them. Truth be told, I looked the other way; the fascinations of the past shield me from the vagaries of the present. All that mattered to me was the knowledge, far more precious than any physical object--knowledge for my own satisfaction, and for humanity as a whole.
I would be Icarus, reaching not for the sun, but for the stars.
I fell.
We all ... fell. Only a few remained, those they had a use for.
I should have known. It's so clear now ... What I saw in those texts. Set, god of darkness and chaos; Ra, god of order and light. The eternal cycle of Set, Osiris, Isis and Horus.
Isis is a Minbari.
Icarus fell.
There is not much time left. I was Daniel Jackson.
Challenge, from Hobsonphile: Daniel Jackson (SG1)/Babylon 5, on the Icarus (Because, dude, you so know that's where Daniel would end up in the B5 verse)