Galactic Empires (31 page)

I could not tell if he was pleased or disappointed. "Continue."

"The green markings on some of the relics. They meant nothing to me at first, but I suppose my subconscious must have picked up on something even then. They were fragments of something larger, which I'd seen before."

"Which was?"

"Arabic writing," I told him.

"Many people would be surprised to hear there was such a thing."

"If they knew their history, they'd know that the Arabs had a written language. An elegant one, too. It's just that most people outside of academic departments won't have ever seen it, any more than they know what Japanese or the Roman alphabet looks like."

"But you, on the other hand-"

"In my work for the khanate, I was obliged to compile dossiers on dissident elements within the empire. Some of the Islamist factions still use a form of Arabic for internal communications."

He sniffed through his nostrils, looking at me with his penetrating blue eyes. The cable car creaked and swayed. "It took my analysis experts eight months to recognize that that lettering had a human origin. The test is over; you have passed. But would you care to speculate on the meaning of your observation? Why are we finding Arabic on phantom relics?"

"I don't know."

"But indulge me."

"It can only mean that there's an Islamist faction out there that we don't know about. A group with independent space-faring capability, the means to use the Infrastructure despite all the access restrictions already in place."

"And the other relics? Where do they fit in?"

"I don't know."

"If I told you that, in addition to items we consider to be of unambiguously alien origin, we'd also found scraps of other vanished or obscure languages—or at least, scripts and symbols connected to them-what would you say?"

I admitted that I had no explanation for how such a thing might be possible. It was one thing to allow the existence of a secret enclave of technologically advanced Islamists, however improbable that might have been. It was quite another to posit the existence of
many
such enclaves, each preserving some vanished or atrophied branch of human culture.

"Here is what's going to happen." He spoke the words as if there could be no possibility of dissent on my behalf. "As has already been made clear, your old life is over, utterly and finally. But there is still much that you can do to serve the will of Heaven. The khanate has only now taken a real interest in the phantoms, whereas we have been alert to the phenomenon for many years. If you care about the security of the empire, you will see the sense in working with Kuchlug."

"You mean, join the team analyzing those relics?"

"As a matter of fact, I want you to lead it." He smiled; I could not tell if the idea had just occurred to him, or whether it had always been at the back of his mind. "You've already demonstrated the acuteness of your observations. I have no doubt that you will continue to uncover truths that the existing team has overlooked."

"I can't just… take over, like that."

He looked taken aback. "Why ever not?"

"A few days ago, I was your prisoner," I said. "Not long before that, you were torturing me. They've no reason to suddenly start trusting me, just on your say-so."

"You're wrong about that," he said, fingering one of the knives strapped across his chest. "They'll trust who I tell them to trust, absolutely and unquestioningly."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because that's how we do things around here."

*

So it was. I joined Qilian's investigative team, immersing myself in the treasure trove of data and relics his people had pieced together in my absence. There was, understandably, a degree of reluctance to accept my authority. But Qilian dealt with that in the expected manner, and slowly, those around me came to a pragmatic understanding that it was either work with me or suffer the consequences.

Relics and fragments continued to fall into our hands. Sometimes the ships that intruded into the Infrastructure were damaged, as if the passage into our territory had been a violent one. Often, the subsequent encounter with one of our ships was enough to shake them to pieces, or at the very least dislodge major components. The majority of these shards vanished without a trace into the implacable machinery of the Infrastructure. Even if the
khorkoi
apparatus was beginning to fail, it was still more than capable of attending to the garbage left behind by its users. But occasionally, pieces lingered in the system (as if the walls had indigestion?), waiting to be swept up by Qilian's ships, and eventually brought home to this moon.

As often as not, though, it was a trivial matter to classify the consignments, requiring only a glance at their contents. The work became so routine, in fact-and the quantity of consignments so high-that eventually I had no choice but to take a step back from hands-on analysis. I assembled six teams and let them get on with it, requiring that they report back to me only when they had something of note: a new empire, or something odd from one of those we already knew about.

That was when the golden egg fell into our hands. It was in the seventh month of my service under Qilian, and I immediately knew that it originated from a culture not yet known to us. Perhaps it was a ship, or part of one. The outer hull was almost entirely covered in a quilt of golden platelets, overlapping in the manner of fish scales. The only parts not covered by the platelets were the dark apertures of sensors and thruster ports, and a small, eye-shaped area on one side of the teardrop that we quickly identified as a door.

Fearing that it might damage the other relics if it exploded under our examinations, I ordered that the analysis of the egg take place in a different part of the mining structure. Soon, though, my concern shifted to the welfare of the egg's occupants. We knew that there were beings inside it, even if we could not be sure if they were human. Scans had illuminated ghostly structures inside the hull: the intestinal complexity of propulsion subsystems, fuel lines, and tanks packed ingeniously tight, the fatty tissue of insulating layers, the bony divisions of armored partitions, the cartilaginous detailing of furniture and life-support equipment. There were even ranks of couches, with eight crew still reclining in them. Dead or in suspended animation, it was impossible to tell. All we could see was their bones, a suggestion of humanoid skeletons, and there was no movement of those bones to suggest respiration.

We got the door open easily enough. It was somewhat like breaking into a safe, but once we had worked out the underlying mechanism—and the curiously alien logic that underpinned its design-it presented no insurmountable difficulties. Gratifyingly, there was only a mild gust of equalizing pressure when the door hinged wide, and none of the sensors arrayed around the egg detected any harmful gases. As far as we could tell, it was filled with an oxygen-nitrogen mix only slightly different from that aboard our own ships.

"What now?" Qilian asked, fingering the patch of hair beneath his lip.

"We'll send machines aboard now," I replied. "Just to be safe, in case there are any booby traps inside."

He placed a heavy, thick-fingered hand on my shoulder. "What say we skip the machines and just take a look inside ourselves?" His tone was playful. "Not afraid, are we, Yellow Dog?"

"Of course not," I answered.

"There's no need to be. I'll go in first, just in case there
are
surprises."

We walked across the floor, through the cordon of sensors, to the base of the attenuated metal staircase that led to the open door. The robots scuttled out of the way. My staff exchanged concerned glances, aware that we were deviating from a protocol we had spent weeks thrashing out to the last detail. I waved down their qualms.

Inside, as we already knew from the scans, the egg was compartmented into several small chambers, with the crew in the middle section. The rear part contained most of the propulsion and life-support equipment. Up front, in the sharp end, was what appeared to be a kind of pressurized cargo space. The egg still had power, judging by the presence of interior lighting, although the air aboard it was very cold and still. It was exceedingly cramped, requiring me to duck and Qilian to stoop almost double. To pass from one compartment to the next, we had to crawl on our hands and knees through doors that were barely large enough for children. The external door was larger than the others, presumably because it had to admit a crew member wearing a spacesuit or some other encumbrance.

Qilian was the first to see the occupants. I was only a few seconds behind him, but those seconds stretched to years as I heard his words.

"They are aliens after all, Yellow Dog. Strapped in their seats like little pale monkeys. I can see why we thought they might be human… but they're not, not at all. So much for the theory that every empire must represent a human enclave, no matter how incomprehensible the artifacts or script."

"That was never my theory, sir. But it's good to have it dismissed."

"They have masks on. I can see their faces, but I'd like a better look."

Still on my knees, I said, "Be careful, sir."

"They're dead, Yellow Dog. Stiff and cold as mummies."

By the time I reached Qilian, he had removed one of the intricate masks from the face of his chosen alien. In his hands, it was tiny, like a delicate accessory belonging to a doll. He put it down carefully, placing it on the creature's lap. The alien was dressed in a quilted gold uniform, cross-buckled into the couch. It was the size of an eight-year-old child, but greatly skinnier in build, its torso and limbs elongated to the point where it resembled a smaller creature that had been stretched. Though its hands were gloved, the layout of the long, dainty-looking digits corresponded exactly to my own: four fingers and an opposed thumb, though each of the digits was uncommonly slender, such that I feared they might snap if we attempted to remove the gloves. Its head-the only part of it not covered by the suit-was delicate and rather beautiful, with huge, dark eyes set in patches of black fur. Its nose and mouth formed one snoutlike feature, suggestive of a dog or cat. It had sleek, intricate ears, running back along the sides of its head. Save for the eye patches, and a black nose at the tip of the snout, its skin varied between a pale buff or off-white.

The alien's hands rested on a pair of small control consoles hinged to the sides of the couch; the consoles were flat surfaces embossed with golden ridges and studs, devoid of markings. A second console angled down from the ceiling to form a blank screen at the creature's eye level. The other seven occupants all had similar amenities. There were no windows, and no controls or readouts in the orthodox sense. The aliens were all alike, with nothing on their uniforms to indicate rank or function. From what little I could see of their faces, the other seven were identical to the one we had unmasked.

I suppose I should have felt awed: here I was, privileged to be one of the first two people in history to set eyes on true aliens. Instead, all I felt was a kind of creeping sadness, and a tawdry, unsettling feeling that I had no business in this place of death.

"I've seen these things before," Qilian said, a note of disbelief in his words.

"These aliens, sir? But this is the first time we've seen them."

"I don't mean that. I mean, isn't there something about them that reminds you of something?"

"Something of what, sir?"

He ignored my question. "I also want this vehicle stripped down to the last bolt, or whatever it is that holds it together. If we can hack into its navigation system, find an Infrastructure map, we may be able to work out where they came from, and how the hell we've missed them until now."

I looked at the embossed gold console and wondered what our chances were of hacking into anything, let alone the navigation system.

"And the aliens, sir? What should we do with them?"

"Cut them up. Find out what makes them tick." Almost as an afterthought, he added, "Of course, make sure they're dead first."

The aliens were not the greatest surprise contained in the egg, but we did not realize that until the autopsy was under way. Qilian and I observed the procedure from a viewing gallery, looking down on the splayed and dissected creature. With great care, bits of it were being removed and placed on sterile metal trays. The interior organs were dry and husklike, reinforcing the view that the aliens were in a state of mummification: perhaps (we speculated) some kind of suspended animation to be used in emergency situations. But the function and placement of the organs were all too familiar; we could have been watching the autopsy of a monkey and not known the difference. The alien even had a tail, lightly striped in black and white; it had been contained within an extension of the clothing, tucked back into a cavity within the seat.

That the creatures must have been intelligent was not open to dispute, but it was still dismaying, when they were cut up, to learn how human their brains looked. Small, certainly, yet with clear division of brain hemispheres, frontal and temporal lobes, and so on. Yet the real shock lay in the blood. It was not necessarily a surprise to find that it had DNA, or even that its DNA appeared to share the same protein coding alphabet as ours. There were (I was led to believe) sound arguments for how that state of affairs might have arisen independently, due to it being the most efficient possible replicating/coding system, given the thermodynamic and combinative rules of carbon-based biochemistry. That was all well and good. But it entirely failed to explain what they found when they compared the alien's chromosomes to ours. More on a whim than anything else, they had tested the alien blood with human-specific probes and found mat chromosomes 1 and 3 of the alien were homeologous to human chromosomes 3, 9, 14, and 21. There were also unexpectedly strong signals in the centromeric regions of the alien chromosomes when probed for human chromosomes 7 and 19. In other words, the alien DNA was not merely similar to ours; it was shockingly, confoundingly, alike.