by Ian Douglas
By now, he’d shucked his armor. He still hadn’t figured out how to use the N’mah sanitary facilities, but at least a constant stream of fresh water trickling into a basin with a drain let him manage a sponge bath. After all of that time in the basic suit utilities, though, he missed a full shower. He might be watching the dawn of his species’ civilization, but he didn’t feel very civilized himself right now. The amphibians evidently didn’t need showers—not when they were in and out of the water all the time anyway—but Garroway was all too aware of his own stink. He continued to use the BSUs for waste disposal and hoped he could figure out how to use the alien equipment before his waste treatment nano needed to be recharged.
All of that was no more than a minor annoyance, however. He was learning a lot, watching the N’mah teach his distant ancestors the essentials of farming, animal husbandry, medicine, math, and science. Of particular interest was the fact that the humans he was seeing in these records appeared to be the ragged survivors of catastrophe.
Was he seeing actual footage or extremely good computer graphics? He couldn’t tell and he supposed it didn’t matter. But he watched brilliant, high-definition images of the An, who’d colonized the Earth at some time prior to the arrival of the N’mah.
He watched the An starships landing, watched the An emerge from the ships in combat armor and carrying weapons. He watched stone-age humans butchered, watched hundreds of them rounded up in pens, watched human slaves building zigguratlike structures and cyclopean walls for their masters, watched human priests offer human sacrifices to the gods to win their favor.
He watched the An as living gods—hairless, reptilian, golden-eyed—ruling from their ziggurat palaces, punishing rebellious villages with lightning from the sky, accepting sacrificed animals and humans alike as…as food.
The butchery had been appalling.
How long had the enslavement lasted? Garroway couldn’t tell from the scenes he was being shown. Centuries, certainly…and quite possibly millennia. He noted that as time went on, however, more and more of the humans—especially the ones who obviously held the roles of leaders and priests over the human cattle—began to shave their heads and tattoo their bodies, apparently in imitation of their gods.
The Adamu, the black-headed people, were trying their best to be like their hairless, reptilian masters.
Cities grew along the waterways of Mesopotamia, in Asia, and in the Americas. The An conquest imposed a sharp stratification of society upon the slave population—rulers and priests at the top, followed by soldiers, followed by the lower castes within the city, and with the wild men, the untamed humans beyond the city walls, at the very bottom. The An gods appeared to rule in fiefdoms that frequently were at war with one another…or perhaps they were simply bloody games of some sort. Garroway watched human armies battling as their gods watched from floating platforms in the sky.
Then the Hunters had arrived.
Garroway assumed he was watching the Hunters of the Dawn, though he never saw anything of them but their ships—immense, gravity-defying structures hanging in space…and the mountain-sized chunks of rock they brought down upon a helpless planet. The An colonies were annihilated, pulverized by direct impact, or drowned by mile-high tsunamis. Later, the Hunter ships had drifted slowly through Earth’s skies, burning down An and human alike as they fled the holocaust.
Eventually, the Hunters had departed.
Time passed. Human survivors emerged from the rubble, from the mountains, and from the forests all across the planet and began attempting to re-create something of the civilization taken from them.
He wondered why. The survivors were free. Why try to bring back the emblem of their enslavement?
Garroway couldn’t understand the running commentary accompanying the scenes, and could only guess. The An had been gods, in every way that mattered, to the humans they’d enslaved. They’d also evidently created a nobility or a ruling caste—the priests and leaders—and those people would not have relinquished their pathetic power over the lower classes easily. Perhaps, too, many of these people were descended not from survivors of the cities, but from the bands of untamed humans that had existed outside of the gods’ domains. It might have been that they’d been envious of the trappings of civilization, without being fully aware of the cruelty of the gods. In any case, certain aspects of the An rule survived, or were re-created.
Perhaps the greatest An curses of all had been organized religion and the monolithic state.
More time passed. A lot of it, Garroway thought, though he couldn’t tell from the images how much. The human survivors continued to eke out a marginal Neolithic existence on the shores of various waterways and seas worldwide, making tools from stone, wood, and bone, making pottery, growing crops.
And then the N’mah had arrived.
And that was where Garroway had come in with the first images he’d seen—N’mah emerging from the water to teach human communities the basics of civilization.
Saviors of civilization? That, at any rate, was what they wanted him to believe, the message they were trying to get across to him. There might well have been some propaganda mixed in with what he was seeing…but, then, it was only natural to try to present one’s self in the best possible light.
That first scene with the counting…he now realized that he’d not been seeing a math lesson, but a language lesson. The language, he was now certain, was indeed ancient Sumerian, and the humans had been teaching it to the N’mah. That stood to reason; if the Sumerians had the words for “one,” “two,” and “three,” they already had the rudiments of arithmetic.
In two days—with only a few hours off for rest when he became exhausted—Garroway had learned a great deal of Sumerian. He didn’t have the ability to download from a central database, but his implant did remember things for him, and remember them well. Once he heard a word and associated it with a meaning, he did not forget it.
A few hours earlier, he’d begun to converse with his captors directly. “Gar-ro-way,” a deep-throated rumble spoke from an overhead speaker in pidgin Sumerian. “Important is to make peace, your people, mine.”
“Important is,” he agreed. “Your people, my people, speak soon.”
“Your people, my people, speak now.”
Garroway looked up sharply at that. Was the voice saying that now was the time for peace talks? Or that peace talks were happening now as they spoke? His grasp of Sumerian grammar was still far too weak to make that kind of distinction.
He was trying to compose a question that would clarify things when the voice continued. “Gar-ro-way. Surprise is.”
“Beg pardon?” he said in English. Then he added, “Ta-am?”
The door to his cell slid open, and Major Warhurst walked in.
“Sir!” Garroway sprung to his feet. “What…how?…”
“I’m getting sick and tired of springing you out of jail, Garroway,” Warhurst said with mock severity. The grin on his face belied the words. “Getting thrown in the slammer back in East LA was bad enough. Now you’re doing it way the hell and gone out here.”
“Hey, sir, you know how Marines like to party.” Garroway looked at Warhurst’s uniform—Marine utilities with his major’s rank pinned to the collar. “You’re not in armor, sir, so the shooting must be over.”
“That it is, Corporal. Thanks in part to you. I gather your willingness to try to talk with the N’mah went a long way to convincing them that we were worth talking to.”
“It was more like surrendering, sir.” He made a face. “I didn’t like that.”
“We do what has to be done. We survive, overcome, adapt.”
There was a commotion in the passageway outside the door. A moment later two more Marines burst in—Kat Vinton and Tim Womicki. “Gare!”
Warhurst stepped aside as Kat exploded into Garroway’s arms. “I needed an escort to come up here,” he said, almost apologetically. “These two wouldn’t let me take a step unless I brought them.”
After a time, Garroway disentangled himself from Kat’s embrace. “It’s…good to see you guys again.” The words sounded so inadequate.
“Hey,” Womicki said, clapping Garroway’s shoulder. “Marines do not leave their own behind. Ever.”
“Semper fi.”
“The reunion had better wait, people,” Warhurst said. “Right now we have to get back to Camp Denderah.”
“Denderah?” Garroway asked. “What’s that?”
“Our new base,” Womicki said. “And it’s a hell of a lot better than on board the Pecker, let me tell you! There’s room to breathe!”
“We’ll fill you in on the way back,” Warhurst said. “Grab your armor and let’s vam.”
Denderah. At first, Garroway assumed that the name was a N’mah word, but he learned that Dr. Franz had contributed the suggestion. It seemed that the ancient Egyptians, who considered the star Sirius to be the soul of the goddess Isis, had built a number of temples oriented toward the heliacal rising of Sirius, the day of the year when Sirius rose at the same moment as the Sun. One of the most important of these was the temple of Isis–Hathor at Denderah, a village on the west bank of the Nile not far downstream from Luxor.
The Marines had embraced the idea when someone had pointed out that some of their own history and blood was mixed in with the place; in 2138, a Marine strike force had gone into Egypt to secure certain historical monuments and sites to protect them from the local fundamentalists. Warhurst, then a captain, had been with the Marines fighting at Giza, but other Marine elements had secured other archeological sites along the Nile, and Denderah had been one of them. An ancient star map had been found there centuries ago and there were numerous clues at the site to contact in the remote past with visitors from the stars. Charlie Company, one-third of the Second MarDiv, had fought a sharp, two-day action there and saved the temple from being blown up by Mahdi fanatics.
And so Denderah it was.
The Sirian Gate’s Denderah occupied a vast, open chamber perhaps twenty kilometers around the ring from the Marine LZ. A hole had been eaten through from outside—this time with the locals’ permission—and an airlock docking collar installed so that TRAPs and supply shuttles could begin offloading the contents of the Altair, one of the robot freighters. Within hours, a small city of inflatable domes filled much of the chamber, providing living quarters for over a thousand men and women, machine and repair shops, storage lockers, transport pools, rec facilities, and mess halls.
The N’mah demonstrated an intriguing aspect of their technology, literally growing a headquarters building from the gate structure itself. The trick, it turned out, was accomplished by using nanotechnic devices injected into the metal to reshape the atomic bonds within the nickel-iron substrate at a quantum level. Those hordes of floating combat machines the Marines had faced two days before had been grown around ready-made propulsion, power, and weapons systems, a process taking only a few moments, and limited only by the number of internal components.
That one discovery, it turned out, had made the PanTerra people quite happy. Nanotechnology had been used to grow many buildings and other structures back on Earth for almost a century, but that process involved mixing raw materials and growing the finished shape in a mold. The N’mah technique was faster, cleaner, and far more powerful—a form of high-tech magic that would net PanTerra trillions when it went into production back home.
The Marines were less concerned with PanTerra’s interests, however, than they were with security. Their hosts seemed ill-at-ease, concerned that the Hunters of the Dawn might already have taken note of the human presence at the Sirius Gate, and if that happened, all of the nanotechnological magic in the universe might not be enough to save the MIEU…or Earth. Warhurst told Garroway that a briefing had already been scheduled between the humans and the Deep Council, a group of elders who were the closest thing to a government, apparently, that the N’mah possessed.
“At least everyone’s agreed on that one,” Warhurst told him as they entered the outskirts of Camp Denderah. A small mob of Marines was approaching, cheering Garroway’s return. “The more information we can share with the N’mah, the better…for both of us. Looks like you have a small reception committee here, Garroway.”
“We already linked to ’em that Gare was okay,” Womicki said, grinning. “I think a small party is in order, don’t you, sir?”
“If it’s not, I doubt that I could stop it,” Warhurst said. “Garroway, S-2 is going to want to talk to you and download whatever you got from the Wiggles. But you can stand down for, oh, make it twenty-four hours. I think I can keep the intel boys off your back for that long.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I suggest you get some food in you, get some rest, and for God’s sake get a shower and a clean uniform! Otherwise, you’re going to be partying by yourself!”
“Aye aye, sir!”
“Carry on.”
The other Marines arrived as Warhurst walked off toward the HQ building. “Hey, Gare!” Roger Eagleton called. “Welcome home!”
“Yeah,” Anna Garcia said. “We thought we’d fuckin’ lost you!”
“Jesus!” Lobowski said, wrinkling his nose. “What the hell’ve you been rolling in, Marine?”
Garroway turned his head and sniffed at the shoulder of his suit utilities. “Whew! I guess the Major was right. I need a shower before I do any serious partying.”
“Or Sirius partying,” Gunnery Sergeant Dunne put in. “Vinton? Show this Marine to his quarters and see that he showers down. Steel beach party at the grinder, fifteen hundred hours. Do you copy?”
“Copy, Gunnery Sergeant!” Garroway snapped back, grinning.
“Then git your sorry ass out of my sight until then! Carry on!”
“I gather everything’s squared away with the Wiggles?” Garroway asked Kat as they walked toward the hab dome that had been designated for Alpha Company.
“Pretty much. We had a prisoner, but Major Warhurst turned him loose. That didn’t stop the fighting, not right away, at any rate, but I guess between that and what you were doing in Wiggle City finally got through. They contacted us by radio through Cassius, speaking ancient Sumerian.”
“Outstanding.”
“Y’know the funny thing? We thought the aquatic Wiggles were the children. It’s the other way around. The Walkers—the ones who do the fighting and the building—they’re the N’mah young. The big seagoing Wiggles, that’s the adult phase. They’re the thinkers and the leaders.” She shook her head. “There’s so much we have to learn!”
“Roger that.” He thought for a moment. “So what’s with this big pow-wow the major was talking about? Something about Earth being in danger?”
“They don’t tell us much,” she said. “You know that. But the word is, some big stuff is happening.”
“Yeah?” Garroway asked her. “Like what?”
“Well, to begin with, the scuttlebutt is…remember that AI we sent through the gate a couple of days ago?”
Garroway nodded. “Sure.”
“Well, the word is, it’s returned. And the brass is not happy with what it saw.”
That gave Garroway something to think about. He stopped thinking about it when he entered the barracks shower, however. Kat joined him under the blast of hot water and there were other, more pleasant things to think about. Afterward, they got reacquainted in Kat’s rack, with the promise that the Alpha Company barracks was going to be otherwise unoccupied for the next couple of hours. Lobowski and Garcia, standing guard outside, would see to that, she told him.
For just a little while, Garroway could forget about Wiggles, Marine deployments, and alien contact with ancient Earth civilizations, and lose himself on that most ancient, and most pleasurable, of all purely human contacts….
General Ramsey
Conference Chamber
Sirius Stargate
1530 hours, Shipboard time
This, Ramsey thought, was the first physical
briefing session he’d attended in longer than he could remember. Noumenal conferences were so much more convenient. All imaginable data were instantly available, a thought-click away, for everyone to see. There was no travel involved, and no discomfort. What had begun a couple centuries ago with telecommuting had eventually become the means for people to interface with one another…virtually, within the computer-guided noumena of their minds.
But human implant technology could not interface with N’mah computers, not yet. The two groups, thanks to the extensive Sumerian language database on the MIEU network, could talk to one another face-to-face or by radio, but more sophisticated forms of communication were going to take time.
The battle fleet had moved in close to the Sirius Gate, and most staff personnel—Navy, Marine, Command, and civilian—had been brought across on board TRAPs to quarters prepared for them within the recently grown N’mah buildings. The place designated as the conference chamber was a large room just below the cavern taken up by Camp Denderah. There was a table and chairs, brought down from the Altair, for the humans, and a pool, accessed from an underwater tunnel, for the N’mah elders. To one side, a five-meter flatscreen had been set up, so that maps, computer simulations, and visual recordings could be shared with the N’mah, who did not have access to human noumena.
It was, Ramsey thought, a scene unlike any since the N’mah had first visited a human village on the shores of the Arabian Gulf, eight thousand years or more before. Fourteen men and women sat around three sides of the table, facing three of the huge, iridescent beings, four-eyed serpents with arms, resting in their pool. Cassius was invisibly present as well, of course, translating for the group. The N’mah would speak Sumerian, a language they had learned and recorded during their interactions with humans millennia ago; Cassius would translate to English via the humans’ implants. The humans spoke English, which Cassius would translate into Sumerian and transmit, by radio, to the communications hardware each N’mah wore imbedded in her skull.
Her skull. He was still getting used to N’mah concepts of gender. From what the medical department had been able to learn so far, N’mah males were internal parasites, resident within the equivalent of the females’ genitalia. Females gave live birth to meter-long offspring that looked like large salamanders. These crawled ashore and were taken in by the Community of the Young, the Walkers who constituted the land-phase of N’mah amphibious life. This juvenile phase lasted for a long time; N’mah concepts of time were still poorly understood, but Dr. Franz thought it might be as long as fifty years.