The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (29 page)

“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 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 were our chances 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 underway. 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 husk-like, 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 was 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 to learn how human their brains looked, when they were cut up. 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 that chromosomes 1 and 3 of the alien were homoeologous 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.

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 which opened to reveal ranks of nested white eggs, hard as porcelain. Here was a curving section of razor-sharp foil, polished to an impossible lustre. 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 foetal 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 towards 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 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 abhorrs the very concept of absence. Our mathematics cannot have served us badly, for upon its back we have built a five-hundred-yearold 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 woke – 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 pronounciation 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 parlour 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 a 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.”