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.
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
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,
