The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Sixth Annual

by Gardner Dozois

  His men came for me again, several days later. I was taken to a pressurised boarding platform, a spindly structure cantilevered out from the side of the government building. A cable car was waiting, a dull-grey, bulbous-ended cylinder swaying gently against its restraints. The guards pushed me aboard, then slammed the airtight door, before turning a massive wheel to lock it shut. Qilian was already aboard the car, sitting in a dimpled leather chair with one leg crossed over the other. He wore huge fur-lined boots equipped with vicious spurs.

  ‘A little trip, I thought,’ he said, by way of welcome, indicating the vacant seat opposite his.

  The cable car lurched into motion. After reaching the limit of the boarding area, it passed through a long glass airlock and then dropped sickeningly, plunging down so far that it descended under the lowest level of buildings and factory structures perched on the platform. One of the huge, skeletal legs was rising towards us, the foot raised as if it intended to stomp down on the fragile little cable car. Yet just when it seemed we were doomed, the car began to climb again, creaking and swaying. Qilian was looking at something through a pair of tiny binoculars, some piece of equipment—a probe or drillhead, I presumed—being winched up from the surface, into the underside of the platform.

  ‘Is there a point to this journey?’ I asked.

  He lowered the binoculars and returned them to a leather case on his belt. ‘Very much so. What I will show you constitutes a kind of test. I would advise you to be on your guard against the obvious.’

  The cable car slid across the fractured landscape of the moon, traversing dizzyingly wide crevasses, dodging geysers, skimming past tilted rockfaces which seemed on the verge of toppling over at any moment. We rose and descended several times, on each occasion passing over one of the walking platforms. Now and then, there was an interruption while we were switched to a different line, before once more plunging down towards the surface. After more than half an hour of this—just when my stomach was beginning to settle into the rhythm—we came to a definite halt on what was in all respects just another boarding platform, attended by a familiar retinue of guards and technical functionaries. Qilian and I disembarked, with his spurs clicking against the cleated metal flooring. With a company of guards for escort, we walked into the interior of the platform’s largest building. The entire place had an oily ambience, rumbling with the vibration of distant drilling processes.

  ‘It’s a cover,’ Qilian said, as if he had read my thoughts. ‘We keep the machines turning, but this is the one platform that doesn’t have a useful production yield. It’s a study facility instead.’

  ‘For studying what?’

  ‘Whatever we manage to recover, basically.’

  Deep in the bowels of the platform, at a level which must have meant they were only just above the underside, was a huge holding tank which—so Qilian informed me—was designed to contain the unrefined liquid slurry that would ordinarily have been pumped up from under the ice. In this platform, the tank had been drained and equipped with power and lighting. The entire space had been partitioned into about a dozen ceilingless rooms, each of which appeared to contain a collection of garbage, arranged within the cells of a printed grid laid out on the floor. Some of the cells held sizable clusters of junk, others were empty. Benches arranged around the edges of the cells were piled with bits of twinkly rubbish, along with an impressive array of analysis tools and recording devices.

  It looked as if it should have been a literal hive of activity, but the entire place was deserted.

  ‘You want to tell me what I’m looking at here?’

  Qilian indicated a ladder. ‘Go down and take a look for yourself. Examine anything that takes your fancy. Use any tools you feel like. Look in the notebooks and data files. Rummage. Break stuff. You won’t be punished if you do.’

  ‘This is phantom technology, isn’t it? You’ve recovered pieces of alien ships.’ I said this in a kind of awed whisper, as if I hardly dared believe it myself.

  ‘Draw whatever conclusion you see fit. I shall be intensely interested in what you have to say.’

  I started down the ladder. I had known from the moment I saw the relics that I would be unable to resist. ‘How long have I got? Before I’m judged to have failed this test, or whatever it is.’

  ‘Take your time,’ he said, smiling. ‘But don’t take too much.’

  There seemed little point agonising over which room to start with, assuming I had the time to examine more than one. The one I chose had the usual arrangement of grid, junk, and equipment benches. Lights burned from a rack suspended overhead. I stepped into the grid, striding over blank squares until she arrived at a promising little clump of mangled parts, some of them glittery, some of them charred to near-blackness. Gingerly, I picked up one of the bits. It was a curving section of metallic foil, ragged along one edge, much lighter and stiffer than I felt it had any right to be. I tested the edge against a finger and drew a bead of blood. No markings or detail of any kind. I placed it back down on the grid and examined another item. Heavier this time, solid in my hands, like a piece of good carved wood. Flowing, scroll-like green patterning on one convex surface: a suggestion of script, or a fragmented part of some script, in a language I did not recognise. I returned it to the grid and picked up a jagged, bifurcated thing like a very unwieldy sword or spearhead, formed in some metallic red material that appeared mirror-smooth and untarnished. In my hands, the thing had an unsettling buzzing quality, as if there was still something going on inside it. I picked up another object: a dented blue-green box, embossed with dense geometric patterns, cross-woven into one another in a manner that made my head hurt. The lid of the box opened to reveal six egglike white ovals, packed into spongey black material. There were six distinct spiral symbols painted onto the ovals, in another language that I did not recognise.

  I perused more objects in the grid, then moved to the benches, where more items were laid out for inspection.

  I moved into one of the adjoining rooms. There was something different about the degree of organisation this time. The grid was the same, but the objects in it had been sorted into rough groupings. In one corner cell was a pile of spiky, metallic red pieces that obviously had something in common with the sword-like object I had examined in the other room. In other lay a cluster of dense, curved pieces with fragmented green patterning on each. Each occupied cell held a similar collection of vaguely related objects.

  I examined another room, but soon felt that I had seen enough to form a ready opinion. The various categories of relic clearly had little in common. If they had all originated from the phantoms—either wrecked or damaged or attacked as they passed through the Infrastructure—then there was only one conclusion to be drawn. There was more than one type of phantom, which, in turn, meant there was more than one kind of alien.

  We were not just dealing with one form of intruder. Judging by the number of filled cells, there were dozens—many dozens—of different alien technologies at play.

  I felt the hairs on the back of my neck bristle. Our probes and instruments had swept the galaxy clean and still we had found no hint of anyone else out there. But these rooms said otherwise. Somehow or other, we had managed to miss the evidence of numerous other galaxy-faring civilisations, all of which were at least as technologically advanced as the Mongol Expansion.

  Other empires, somehow coexisting with ours!

  I was ready to return to Qilian, but, at the last moment, as I prepared to ascend the ladder, something held me back. It had all been too simple. Anyone with a pair of eyes in their head would have arrived at the same conclusion as I had. Qilian had said it would be a test, and that I must pass it.

  It had been too easy so far.

  Therefore, I must have missed something.

  ______

  When we were back on the cable car, nosing down to the geysering surface, Qilian stroked a finger against his chin and watched me with an intense, snakelike fascination.

  ‘You ret
urned to the rooms.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Something made you go back, when it looked as if you’d already finished.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have been in my interests to fail you.’

  There was a gleam in his eye. ‘So what was it, Yellow Dog, that made you hesitate?’

  ‘A feeling that I’d missed something. The obvious inference was that the collection implied the presence of more than one intruding culture, but you didn’t need me to tell you that.’

  ‘No,’ he acknowledged.

  ‘So there had to be something else. I didn’t know what. But when I went back into the second room, something flashed through my mind. I knew I had seen something in there before, even if it had been in a completely different context.’

  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 recognise 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 in de pen dent spacefaring 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 analysing 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 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 armoured 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 equalising 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 pressurised 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 crewmember 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 artefacts or script.’