Galactic Empires (32 page)

The only possible explanation was that we were related.

Qilian and I were trying to work out the ramifications of this when news came in from the team examining the pod. Uugan—my deputy—came scuttling into the autopsy viewing room, rubbing sweaty hands together. "We've found something," he said, almost tongue-tied with excitement.

Qilian showed him the hot-off-the-press summary from the genetics analysis. "So have we. Those aliens aren't alien. They came from the same planet we did. I
thought
they looked like lemurs. That's because they
are.'"

Uugan had as much trouble dealing with that as we did. I could almost hear the gears meshing in his brain, working through the possibilities. "Aliens must have uplifted lemur stock in the deep past, using genetic engineering to turn them into intelligent, tool-using beings." He raised a finger. "Or, other aliens spread the same genetic material on more than one world. If that were the case, these lemurs need not be from Greater Mongolia after all."

"What news do you have for us?" Qilian asked, smiling slightly at Uugan's wild theorizing.

"Come to the egg, please. It will be easier if I show you."

We hastened after Uugan, both of us refraining from any speculation as to what he might have found. As it happened, I do not think either of us would have guessed correctly.

In the sharp end of the egg, the investigators had uncovered a haul of cargo, much of which had now been removed and laid out on the floor for inspection. I glanced at some of the items as we completed the walk to the pod, recognizing bits and pieces from some of the other cultures we already knew about. Here was a branching, sharp-tipped metallic red thing, like an instrument for impaling. Here was a complexly manufactured casket that opened to reveal ranks of nested white eggs, hard as porcelain. Here was a curving section of razor-sharp foil, polished to an impossible luster. Dozens more relics from dozens of other known empires, and still dozens more that represented empires of which we knew nothing.

"They've been collecting things, just like us," I said.

"Including this," Uugan said, drawing my attention to the object that now stood at the base of the egg.

It was the size and shape of a large urn, golden in construction, surfaced with bas-relief detailing, with eight curved green windows set into its upper surface. I peered closer and rested a hand against the urn's throbbing skin. Through the windows burbled a dark liquid. In the dark liquid, something pale floated. I made out the knobbed ridge of a spine, a backbone pressing through flawless skin. It was a person, a human, a man judging by his musculature, curled into fetal position. I could only see the back of his head: bald and waxy, scribed with fine white scars. Ridged cables dangled in the fluid, running toward what I presumed was a breathing apparatus, now hidden.

Qilian looked through one of the other windows. After a lengthy silence, he straightened himself and nodded. "Do you think he was their prisoner?"

"No way to tell, short of thawing him and out and seeing what he has to say on the matter," Uugan said.

"Do what you can," Qilian told Uugan. "I would very, very much like to speak to this gentleman." Then he leaned in closer, as if what he was about to say was meant only for Uugan's ears. "This would be an excellent time not to make a mistake, if you understand my meaning."

*

I do not believe that Qilian's words had any effect on Uugan; he was either going to succeed or not, and the difference between the two outcomes depended solely on the nature of the problem, not his degree of application to the task. As it happened, the man was neither dead nor brain dead, and his revival proved childishly simple. Many weeks were spent in preparation before the decisive moment, evaluating all known variables. When the day came, Uugan's intervention was kept to a minimum: he merely opened the preservation vat, extracted the man from his fluid cocoon, and (it must be said, with fastidious care) removed the breathing apparatus. Uugan was standing by with all the tools of emergency medical intervention at his disposal, but no such assistance was required. The man simply convulsed, drew in several gulping breaths, and then settled into a normal respiratory pattern. But he had yet to open his eyes, or signal any awareness in the change of his surroundings. Scans measured brain activity, but at a level indicative of coma rather than consciousness. The same scans also detected a network of microscopic machines in the man's brain and much of his wider nervous system. Though we could not see these implants as clearly as those we had harvested from the lemur, they were clearly derived from a different technology.

Where had he come from? What did he know of the phantoms?

For weeks, it appeared that we would have no direct answer to these questions. There was one thing, one clue, but we almost missed it. Many days after the man's removal from the vat, one of Uugan's technicians was working alone in the laboratory where we kept our new guest. The lights were dimmed and the technician was using an ultraviolet device to sterilize some culture dishes. By chance, the technician noticed something glowing on the side of the man's neck. It turned out to be a kind of tattoo, a sequence of horizontal symbols that was invisible except under ultraviolet stimulation.

I was summoned to examine the discovery. What I found was a word in Arabic,
Altair,
meaning eagle, and a string of digits, twenty in all, composed of nine numerical symbols, and the tenth, what the pre-Mongol scholars called in their dead language
theca
or
circulus
or
figura nihili,
the round symbol that means, literally, nothing. Our mathematics incorporates no such entity. I have heard it said that there is something in the Mongol psyche that abhors the very concept of absence. Our mathematics cannot have served us badly, for upon its back we have built a five-hundred-year-old galactic empire-even if the
khorkoi
gave us the true keys to that kingdom. But I have also heard it said that our system would have been much less cumbersome had we adopted that Arabic symbol for nothing.

No matter; it was what the symbols told me that was important, not what they said about our choice of number system. In optimistic anticipation that he would eventually learn to speak, and that his tongue would turn out to be Arabic, I busied myself with preparations. For a provincial thug, Qilian had a library as comprehensive as anything accessible from NHK. I retrieved primers on Arabic, most of which were tailored for use by security operatives hoping to crack Islamist terror cells, and set about trying to become an interpreter.

But when the man awoke—which was weeks later, by which time it felt as if I had been studying those primers for half my life—all my preparations might as well have been for nothing. He was sitting up in bed, monitored by machines and watched by hidden guards, when I came into the room. Aside from the technician who had first noticed his return to consciousness, the man had seen no other human being since his arrival.

I closed the door and walked to his bedside. I sat down next to him, adjusting the blue silk folds of my skirt decorously.

"I am Yellow Dog," I told him in Arabic, speaking the words slowly and carefully. "You are among friends. We want to help you, but we do not know much about you."

He looked at me blankly. After a few seconds I added: "Can you understand me?"

His expression and response told me everything I needed to know. He spoke softly, emitting a string of words that sounded superficially Arabic without making any sense to me at all. By then I had listened to enough recordings to know the difference between Arabic and baby talk, and all I was hearing was gibberish.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I do not understand you. Perhaps if we started again, slower this time." I touched a hand to my breast. "I am Yellow Dog. Who are you?"

He answered me then, and maybe it was his name, but it could just as easily have been a curt refusal to answer my question. He started looking agitated, glancing around the room as if it was only now that he was paying due regard to his surroundings. He fingered the thin cloth of his blanket and rubbed at the bandage on his arm where a catheter had been inserted. Once more I told him my name and urged him to respond in kind, but whatever he said this time was not the same as his first answer.

"Wait," I said, remembering something, a contingency I had hoped not to have to use. I reached into my satchel and retrieved a printout. I held the filmy paper before me and read slowly from the adhan, the Muslim call to prayer.

My pronunciation must still not have been perfect, because I had to repeat the words three or four times before some flicker of recognition appeared behind his eyes and he began to echo what I was saying. Yet even as he spoke the incantation, there was a puzzlement in his voice, as if he could not quite work out why we should be engaged in this odd parlor game.

"So I was half right," I said, when he had fallen silent again, waiting for me to say something. "You know something of Islamic culture. But you do not understand anything I say, except when I speak words that have not been permitted to change in fifteen centuries, and even then you only just grasp what I mean to say." I smiled, not in despair, but in rueful acknowledgment that the journey we had to make would be much longer and more arduous than I had imagined. Continuing in Mongol, so that he could hear my tongue, I said: "But at least we have something, my friend, a stone to build on. That's better than nothing, isn't it?"

"Do you understand me now?" he asked, in flawless Mongol.

I was astonished, quite unable to speak. Now that I had grown accustomed to his baldness and pallor, I could better appreciate those aspects of his face that I had been inclined to overlook before. He had delicate features, kind and scholarly. I had never been attracted to men in a sexual sense, and I could not say that I felt any such longing for this man. But I saw the sadness in his eyes, the homesick flicker that told me he was a long way from family and friends (such as I have never known, but can easily imagine), and I knew that I wished to help him.

"You speak our language," I said eventually, as if the fact of it needed stating.

"It is not a difficult one. What is your name? I caught something that sounded like 'filthy hound,' but that cannot have been correct."

"I was trying to speak Arabic. And failing, obviously. My name is Yellow Dog. It's a code, an operational identifier."

"Therefore not your real name."

"Ariunaa," I said softly. "I use it sometimes. But around here they call me Yellow Dog."

"Muhunnad," he said, touching his sternum.

"Muhunnad," I repeated. Then: "If you understood my name-or thought you understood it-why didn't you answer me until I spoke Mongolian? My Arabic can't be that bad, surely."

"You speak Arabic like someone who has only heard a whisper of a whisper of a whisper. Some of the words are almost recognizable, but they are like glints of gold in a stream." He offered me a smile, as if it hurt him to have to criticize. "You were doing your best. But the version of Arabic I speak is not the one you think you know."

"How many versions are there?"

"More than you realize, evidently." He paused. "I think I know where I am. We are inside the Mongol Expansion. We were on the same track until 659, by my calendar."

"What other calendar is there?"

"You count from the death of a warrior-deity; we count from the flight of the Prophet from Mecca. The year now is 1604 by the Caliphate's reckoning; 999 by your own, 2226 by the calendar of the United Nations. Really, we are quibbling over mere centuries. The Smiling Ones use a much older dating system, as they must. The-"

I interrupted him. "What are you talking about? You are an emissary from a previously hidden Islamic state, that is all. At some point in the five hundred years of the Mongol Expansion, your people must have escaped central control to establish a secret colony, or network of colonies, on the very edge of the Infrastructure."

"It is not like that, Ariunaa. Not like that at all." Then he leaned higher on the bed, like a man who had just remembered an urgent errand. "How exactly did I get here? I had not been tasked to gather intelligence on the Mongols, not this time around."

"The lemurs," I answered. "We found you with them."

I watched him shudder, as if the memory of something awful had only just returned. "You mean I was their prisoner, I think." Then he looked at me curiously. "Your questions puzzle me, Ariunaa. Our data on the Mongols was never of the highest quality, but we had always taken it for granted that you understood."

"Understood
what
?"

"The troubling nature of things," he said.

*

The cable car pitched down from the boarding platform, ducking beneath the base of the immense walking platform. After a short while, it came to an abrupt halt, swaying slightly. Qilian pulled out his binoculars and focused on a detail under the platform, between the huge, slowly moving machinery of the skeletal support legs.

"There," he said, passing me the binoculars.

I took them with trembling hands. I had been on my way to Muhunnad for one of our fruitless but not unpleasant conversational sessions, when Qilian's men had diverted me to the cable car platform.

"What am I supposed to be looking at?"

"Press the stud on the side."

I did so. Powerful gyroscopes made the binoculars twist in my hands, tracking and zooming in on a specific object, a thing hanging down from the underside like the weight on the end of a plumb line. I recalled now the thing I had seen the first time Qilian had accompanied me in the cable car, the thing that he had been examining with the binoculars. I had thought it was some kind of test probe or drilling gear being winched back into the platform. I saw now that I had been wrong.

I did need to see his face to know that I was looking at Muhunnad. He had been stuffed into a primitive spacesuit, blackened by multiple exposures to scorching heat and corrosive elements. They had him suspended from his feet, with his head nearest the ground. He was being lowered down toward one of those outgassing rifts in the surface of the Qing Shui moon.