Analog SFF, July-August 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “But how could they know where to bury them, to be safe against accidental..."

  Her voice trailed off. I looked expectantly at her, giving her time to finish the thought.

  “They ... they buried them in the place where they had already dug them up,” she finished. “Which they knew would not be disturbed, because it hadn't been. Hell, it's logical, but the logic is crazy."

  “That,” I said, “is time travel."

  “What are you going to do about this?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “No law has been broken, no endangered species has been threatened. They're in the clear, even if we could convince a judge and jury that someone has invented a time machine. It's not actually illegal to invent a time machine. Anyway, what about you?"

  “Uh? Oh, the news I was burning to tell you? It's not as exciting as yours. The samples of mammoth arrived, the ones from the new deposits. A bit disappointing, really—just tissue samples. I'd been hoping for something bigger, maybe even a bone or two. Adequate for genetic profiling, but not much else."

  “Still, that should give you any family relationships."

  “Been there, done that. It looks like a dozen or so separate herds, all very closely related."

  I grinned. “Then you've got evidence of more effective hunting."

  “I know. But I wasn't expecting the mesolithic techniques to improve that much. Better edges to the flint spearheads, yes ... but not mass slaughter, which is what it looks like."

  I took her hand. “It's a puzzle, I can see that."

  She gave my hand a quick squeeze. “It gets worse. Why were all the remains in the same place? It's not near a cliff or anything. Still, there may be more information. After the DNA analysis, I decided to try something else. Run some samples through a mass spectrometer, get their composition."

  “What for?"

  “Could be traces of environmental contaminants, clues to behavior ... Hell, if I knew what I was going to find I wouldn't need to look for it, okay?"

  “Sure, sure. So what did you find?"

  “Nothing yet, the samples are still being analyzed. In fact"—she glanced at her wristband—"the results ought to be through by now. Give me a moment to call them up."

  She went very quiet.

  “Something wrong?"

  “Uh—no, nothing wrong. Just not what I expected.” I waited patiently. “Aside from the organics, there's some iron, plus tiny amounts of vanadium, tungsten, that kind of thing. The big puzzle is the uranium."

  “Uranium?"

  “Yes. Quite a lot of it. I wonder if there are any local sources of uranium ore?"

  It was my turn to go quiet. When I managed to speak, I said “It's not ore, Salima. That's what an AK-83 assault rifle fires. Steel alloy bullets tipped with depleted uranium. It can kill from a mile away, packs a massive punch close up. Just right for killing elephants. Or mammoths."

  “You can't mean—"

  “Get your lab to do some isotope ratios, Salima. Call up the composition for the AK-83's ammunition—the heavy-duty stuff with uranium tips. I'm betting that if you age the ratios by 11,000 years, they'll be spot on."

  “You do mean. Are you really—"

  I sighed. “Salima, your mammoth graveyard is where Tsong's employers slaughtered mammoths, at the end of the Pleistocene. Not where they buried the tusks—those are long gone. Where they left the corpses. Tsong said it was cold, and he was from Tibet. In those latitudes it was still deep in an Ice Age. The corpses ended up in the permafrost where your Professor Zhao's Russian colleagues could dig them up.” I paused. “Where exactly is this mammoth graveyard?"

  “Near a small town called Yerekhtenya-Tala. It's in the wilds of Siberia, north of the Arctic Circle."

  I brought up some maps on my wristband. “Not far from the Khrebet Cherskogo. That clinches it. You've made an earth-shattering archaeological discovery, Salima. It would be the jewel in the crown of your thesis.

  “Except you can't use it. No one would ever believe you."

  Her face was a picture. “No ... they wouldn't ... We've both discovered something amazing ... and neither of us can ever breathe a word of it without being hauled away for psychiatric treatment and ideological retraining."

  “Not even with those isotope ratios as evidence?"

  “They'll say it's coincidence. Or modern contamination. Or bad technique."

  “The photos? The diary?"

  “Fakes. Fiction. Anything to avoid a time machine. You know what scientists are like. Paleontologists are worse. We know so little about the past, you see—” Her face paled. “Mike, what could a criminal gang do with a time machine, other than taking money off rich time-tourists and slaughtering mammoths?"

  I'd been so keen to solve the puzzle that I hadn't thought about the implications. “Quite a bit, if they had the imagination,” I said thoughtfully.

  “They could go back and change the past, Mike."

  I laughed. “They could,” I said. “But it all happened 30 years ago. If they were going to cause time paradoxes, they'd have done so by now. Maybe the Time Police got onto them and took away their machine. Maybe it's not a machine, just a freak of nature linking modern Siberia to the Pleistocene. A time warp."

  “Lots of maybes ... Mike, if they were changing the future, right now—whatever that means—how would we know?"

  “We wouldn't. It would just be a different ‘we.’ This ‘we’ is living in whatever world it all led to. Look, there's nothing we can do about it."

  Salima still seemed worried. “At any rate,” I said, trying to divert her away from deep philosophical questions that no one could possibly answer, “nothing criminal happened 30 years ago. Not technically. All they did was kill a few hundred mammoths, at a time when there must have been millions."

  Salima went even paler.

  “You okay?” She looked really ill.

  “Yeah, sure ... I've just ... Mike, the time-tourists may have killed a few hundred on that occasion. But how many expeditions were there? Or will there be?"

  We stared at each other, aghast.

  “It's the timing, Mike. That photo was taken 11,000 years ago. Don't you see what that means?"

  The irony was exquisite. “I was right, then,” I said. “It was hunting that killed off the mammoths."

  She made a face. “You were half right. It wasn't ancient humans."

  “No, it wasn't. I concede. You realize that you've made one of the biggest paleontological discoveries ever? But ... there's no way you can publish a word of it."

  Salima made a visible effort to pull her thoughts together. “Publication be damned, Mike. This calls for action! The mammoths are dead and we can't change that. But we've got to do something to expose these people!"

  I'd had a feeling this was coming. Salima is a fighter. “I agree. But it's going to be even harder than you think."

  “Why?"

  “I wasn't going to mention it in case you started worrying, but some kind person sent me a present this morning. An elephant carved from fossil mammoth ivory."

  “That's nice. But who—"

  “It's a warning,” I said. “From the Chinese mafia. They know I'm onto them. They want me to lay off.” I took a deep breath. “I'm beginning to think that Tsong didn't die of natural causes.” She looked scared. So, I'm sure, did I. “But that's probably just me being paranoid,” I added lamely.

  She gripped my hand. “So will you lay off, Mike?"

  I snorted. “Yes. For me, that elephant is the final proof. But no court of law would accept the connection. I'll drop the case."

  “Very wise.” She paused. Was that a look of disappointment? “That's not like you.” She certainly sounded disappointed. She let go my hand. The blood pounded in my veins. Faint heart never won fair paleontologist. I took a deep breath.

  “You're right, Salima. It's not. I'm going to nail those bastards if it kills me. But I don't intend to commit suicide just yet, so I'll make it look as though I've drop
ped the case. I'll need a lot more information before I can pin anything on them. Which triad, the name of its shan chu, what channels they use to sell the ivory—"

  She protested. “But Mike, we've already agreed that no one would ever swallow anything as far-fetched as time travel!"

  I nodded. “I'm not going to get them on time travel, Salima. Even if a court would believe me, hunting mammoths in the Pleistocene is perfectly legal.” I tossed the package from hand to hand. “No, I'll get them the usual way SCITES deals with organized criminals."

  “Which is?"

  I sighed. “The oldest trick in the book. Tax evasion. As Al Capone discovered to his cost, you can't run an illegitimate operation and keep your paperwork in order. But it will take a lot of very cautious undercover work to accumulate the necessary evidence, and until then, I'll keep my head dow—"

  She grabbed my ears and kissed me. “That's more like the Mike I knew! Uh—you still want me to move in?"

  “The thought has never left my mind,” I said, my voice muffled.

  “I'll bet. Give me a month to sort out my rent, and then—no, scrub that, I'll move in tomorrow."

  I gave her a quick squeeze, and tossed the package onto the couch. “I'll have to get this tested for fingerprints, but of course there won't be any. Strange to think that the ivory is from what is laughingly considered an approved source."

  Through the plastic wrapping, I could see a slip of yellow paper.

  I didn't need to look to know what was written on it.

  Copyright 2006 Ian Stewart

  * * * *

  "If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.”

  —Anatole France

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  STRING OF PEARLS

  by SHANE TOURTELLOTTE

  Illustrated by John Allemand

  * * * *

  Any tool has multiple uses. Language, for example, can be either a bridge or a barrier....

  The doortone sounded, but Marcus Parrish didn't answer. He had set aside these hours, almost all his hours on the ship, for study in his cabin. He had to make the breakthrough, before planetfall if he could. The task allowed no time for casual socializing.

  If his caller were just casual, he wouldn't have to worry. He settled back into the glossary before him, letting the deep white-noise hum of the FTL engines suffuse him, shutting everything else out.

  The door sounded again, twice in succession. Marcus laid the tablet aside. So much for casual. “Is that you, Jun Hua?” he asked in his best New Mandarin.

  “Did you expect someone else, Marc?” came the reply in English.

  The familiarity with his name grated, but he ignored it. “Come in."

  The door hissed up. Jun Hua slid his rotund frame inside, a move made harder by the large canvas bag he carried with him. “You've been avoiding me, Marc,” he said, as he looked for a place to sit.

  “I'm avoiding everyone.” Marcus threw a couple of pillows to the other side of the low table where he sat. Naha Uchusen was a cramped ship, but it did try to provide comfort in its small spaces. “What brings you?"

  Jun Hua folded himself down. “I wanted to give you a deeper briefing, about your sponsor on Obrith, and other things about the Kevhtre Union, including some pertinent social details."

  “I've been studying the Kevh for years.” He caught Jun's scowl. The aliens used “Kevhtre Union” as a corporate noun to describe both their race and their polity. They didn't seem to have a more succinct name for themselves. “Kevhtre” and “Kevh” were common abbreviations among humans, and humans only. Jun Hua was probably afraid he didn't know that. “If you've got info I haven't, I'm all ears."

  Jun handed him a tablet slip. “These are some personal observations on Bunwadde, from embassy staff and Language Section officers. They have found him one of their most receptive private citizens."

  “That helps when you do a lot of business with Earth,” Marcus said, “even in the Kevhtre's particular style. Comes of speaking five human languages, I guess."

  Jun nodded slowly. “That, and he is unusually tolerant of humans who try to speak his."

  Marcus's cheeks burned. It was a failing all humans shared, but it still felt personal. He took the slip from its sleeve, and plugged it into his tablet. Reading it meant he didn't have to look at Jun Hua right now. “Must feel good for the language experts to find a Kevh who'll do as much as tolerate them."

  That struck home. “We don't need reminders of our shortcomings. We get them every time we speak more than a few sentences of Vetra with a native speaker."

  Sentences were the problem, of course, not words. The vocabulary was large but not that difficult: non-inflected, conjugation with tense-mark words, and just a few irregular plurals and possessives. But the syntax...

  “And remember,” Jun Hua continued, “you're in the same boat we are."

  “I'm a businessman first,” Marcus snapped, “not a linguist."

  “But we have a common goal."

  Marcus didn't reply. For them, it was an end. For him, it was a means, to break through in his business career, to break into the immense Kevhtre market. Or it had started so.

  “Full immersion is often effective in learning languages,” Jun said. “We would have done this earlier, if the Kevhtre Union government had not resisted."

  That government knew the advantage it held. It banned its people from providing humans any language instruction, prescribing terrible punishments for the offense. Its computer networks were off-limits to humans, lest one dig up that information. There might have been attempts, but there had been no successes, and nobody had admitted a failure.

  Marcus nodded. “It's easy to negotiate from strength. Do I want to know what we gave away this time?"

  Jun stiffened. Another hit. “Luckily, there are some avenues that don't require negotiations."

  He reached into his bag. Marcus perked up. Then his eyes widened. “What is that?"

  Jun Hua laid the large box on the table. The top was dominated by a trio of triangles nested in a line, points up-down-up, white ideograms on black, orange, and black.

  “Tazpet nulh chomaken,” Marcus read. “Gems on a pendant-pin?"

  “The English vernacular would be ‘String of Pearls.’ It's a very popular game on Obrith."

  “Game?” He undid the clasps and opened the box. Inside was a round turntable with a raised grid, an equilateral triangle tiled with smaller triangles in several different colors. He counted sixteen triangles to a side.

  Under the turntable was a drawstring bag. He spilled some of the contents onto the grid. They were the same triangular tiles as on the lid. They came in seven colors, like a human spectrum, but just that little bit off, like fruits not quite ripe. The red tiles faded toward orange; the yellow ones had a sickly greenish cast. The black was actually deep violet, if one looked closely.

  He read a few of the ideograms, each with a tiny number below it. He flipped one tile, and found the same marks, the number now down at the point rather than at the base.

  Marcus rolled the tile around in his hand. “I used to play a game like this. I was good, too."

  Jun Hua chuckled to himself. “I know the game, but this one builds sentences instead of words, and has many other differences."

  “Like, what spelling is to ours, syntax is to theirs.” Marcus nodded, then knitted his brow. “But it isn't like they can use a dictionary as a judge, unless—” He found it just as Jun pointed: an on-off switch. The game had a built-in computer judge, and probably used chips in the tiles.

  He still frowned. “So, I'm supposed to learn the language from this?"

  “It's another part of the immersion. One more tool, and we have few enough. You should have plenty of opportunity to test yourself at it."

  Marcus caught what hadn't yet been said. “Bunwadde plays this?"

  Jun closed off any expression. “One of Earth's minor diplomats ... learned this
. It seems reasonable he would play you, if you were willing."

  Marcus took that as a challenge. “Sure I'm willing.” He looked at the board and the scattering of tiles. He pinched the tile he'd been manipulating between two fingers. “But forgive me if I'm not sure putting together rote sentences with—” He dropped the tile into its bag. “—a very limited vocabulary is better than hearing and speaking their language in context."

  “Consider it part of the context, at least culturally. Besides, your stay with Bunwadde is all about doing several things at once. You'll be teaching yourself by hearing and reading and speaking, and playing; just as your work on Obrith is to learn the syntax, as well as to help Bunwadde build his—how did I see it described?—his pirate empire."

  “Now, now, Jun. Not even I would call it that."

  “Of course you wouldn't.” Jun smiled. “Not in Kevhtre Union presence, certainly."

  * * * *

  Marcus studied the game during spare hours in the week before planetfall. There were few of those. He had his other language studies, jumbled by the shift in sleeping patterns he was forcing to match Obrith's diurnal pattern. He almost never left his cabin.

  He told himself it was helping his adjustment. It didn't help his learning. The great insight did not come. It felt like going into a battle unarmed.

  The ship made sub-light transition during what was now to him the small hours of the morning. The shift in hum woke him, but he went back to sleep. It wasn't until mid-afternoon that Naha's shuttle touched down outside Ubhettid, Obrith's administrative seat. (Kevhtre Union translators rejected “capital” as too centralized.) Most of the passengers went in a group to the embassy, leaving Marcus alone in the terminal, standing outside the streams of Kevhtre walking by.

  He was used to the people, but not to the numbers. They moved in streams of blue and silver, with robes in nearly every other color. A few looked his way. If he read their faces right, they were amused.

  Soon, one was sure to come over, to say something to him. He'd be hoping for a good laugh. Marcus hoped he wouldn't give him one.