Alien Contact (19 page)

It was Tcharock, the founder of the 30th Dynasty, who decreed that the person of the Emperor was sacrosanct and could not be touched by any being other than his medics and his concubines, and then only with his consent.

His greatest advisor was Chaluba, who extended Tcharock’s rule to more than 80% of the planet and halted the hyper-inflation that had been the 29th Dynasty’s legacy to him.

One night, during a state function, Chaluba inadvertently brushed against Tcharock while introducing him to the Ambassador from far Domar.

The next morning Tcharock regretfully gave the signal to the executioner, and Chaluba was beheaded. Despite this unfortunate beginning, the 30th Dynasty survived for 1,062 Standard years.

The woman, embarrassed, begins apologizing to me. But I notice that she, too, avoids touching me. The man goes off after the child, and a few moments later the two of them return—which is just as well, for the woman has begun repeating herself.

The man pushes the child toward me, and he sullenly utters an apology. The man takes an ominous step toward him, and he reluctantly reaches out his hand. I take it briefly—the contact is no more pleasant for me than for him—and then we enter the Tomb. Two other groups are there, but they are hundreds of meters away, and we cannot hear what their guides are saying.

“How high is the ceiling?” asks the woman, training her camera on the exquisite carvings overhead.

“Thirty-eight meters,” I say. “The Tomb itself is 203 meters long and 67 meters wide. The body of Bedorian V is in a large vault beneath the floor.” I pause, thinking as always of past glories. “On the Day of Mourning, the day the Tomb was completed, a million Antareans stood patiently in line outside the Tomb to pay their last respects.”

“I don’t mean to ask a silly question,” says the woman, “but why are all the buildings so
enormous?”

“Ego,” suggests the man, confident in his wisdom.

“The Maker Of All Things is huge,” I explain. “So my people felt that any monuments to Him should be as large as possible, so that He might be comfortable inside them.”

“You think your God can’t find or fit into a small building?” asks the man with a condescending smile.

“He is everyone’s God,” I answer. “And while He can of course find a small temple, why should we force Him to live in one?”

“Did Bedorian have a wife?” asks the woman, her mind back to smaller considerations.

“He had five of them,” I answer. “The tomb next to this one is known as the Place of Bedorian’s Queens.”

“He was a polygamist?”

I shake my head. “No. Bedorian simply outlived his first four queens.”

“He must have died a very old man,” says the woman.

“He did not,” I answer. “There is a belief among my people that those who achieve public greatness are doomed to private misery. Such was Bedorian’s fate.” I turn to the child, who has been silent since returning, and ask him if he has any questions, but he merely glares at me without speaking.

“How long ago was this place built?” asks the man.

“Bedorian V died 6,302 Standard years ago. It took another seventeen years to build and prepare the Tomb.”

“6,302 years,” he muses. “That’s a long time.”

“We are an ancient race,” I reply proudly. “A human anthropologist has suggested that our 3rd Dynasty commenced before your ancestors crossed over the evolutionary barrier into sentience.”

“Maybe we spent a long time living in the trees,” says the man, clearly unimpressed and just a bit defensive. “But look how quickly we passed you once we climbed down.”

“If you say so,” I answer noncommittally.

“In fact, everybody passed you,” he persists. “Look at the record: How many times has Antares been conquered?”

“I am not sure,” I lie, for I find it humiliating to speak of it.

When the Antareans learned that Man’s Republic wished to annex their world, they gathered their army in Zanthu and then marched out onto the battlefield, 300,000 strong. They were the cream of the planet’s young warriors, gold of eye, the reticulated plates of their skin glistening in the morning sun, prepared to defend their homeworld.

The Republic sent a single ship that flew high overhead and dropped a single bomb, and in less than a second there was no longer an Antarean army, or a city of Zanthu, or a Great Library of Cthstoka.

Over the millennia Antares was conquered four times by Man, twice by the Canphor Twins, and once each by Lodin XI, Emra, Ramor, and the Sett Empire. It was said that the parched ground had finally quenched its thirst by drinking a lake of Antarean blood.

As we leave the Tomb, we come to a small, skinny
rapu
. He sits on a rock, staring at us with his large, golden eyes, his expression rapt in contemplation.

The human child pointedly ignores him and continues walking toward the next temple, but the adults stop.

“What a cute little thing!” enthuses the woman. “And he looks so hungry.” She digs into her shoulder bag and withdraws a sweet that she has kept from breakfast. “Here,” she says, holding it up. “Would you like it?”

The
rapu
never moves. This is unique not only in the woman’s experience, but also in mine, for he is obviously undernourished.

“Maybe he can’t metabolize it,” suggests the man. He pulls a coin out, steps over to the
rapu,
and extends his hand. “Here you go, kid.”

The
rapu,
his face frozen in contemplation, makes no attempt to grab the coin.

And suddenly I am thinking excitedly:
You disdain their food when you are hungry, and their money when you are poor. Could you possibly be the One we have awaited for so many millennia, the One who will give us back our former glory and initiate the 44th Dynasty?

I study him intently, and my excitement fades just as quickly as it came upon me. The
rapu
does not disdain their food and their money. His golden eyes are clouded over. Life in the streets has so weakened him that he has become blind, and of course he does not understand what they are saying. His seeming arrogance comes not from pride or some inner light, but because he is not aware of their offerings.

“Please,” I say, gently taking the sweet from the woman without coming into actual contact with her fingers. I walk over and place it in the
rapu’
s hand. He sniffs it, then gulps it down hungrily and extends his hand, blindly begging for more.

“It breaks your heart,” says the woman.

“Oh, it’s no worse than what we saw on Bareimus V,” responds the man. “They were every bit as poor—and remember that awful skin disease that they all had?”

The woman considers, and her face reflects the unpleasantness of the memory. “I suppose you’re right at that.” She shrugs, and I can tell that even though the child is still in front of us, hand outstretched, she has already put him from her mind.

I lead them through the Garden of the Vanished Princes, with its tormented history of sacrifice and intrigue, and suddenly the man stops.

“What happened here?” he asks, pointing to a number of empty pedestals.

“History happened,” I explain. “Or avarice, for sometimes they are the same thing.” He seems confused, so I continue: “If any of our conquerors could find a way to transport a treasure back to his home planet, he did. Anything small enough to be plundered
was
plundered.”

“And these statues that have been defaced?” he says, pointing to them. “Did you do it yourselves so they would be worthless to occupying armies?”

“No,” I answer.

“Well, whoever did
that”
—he points to a headless statue—“ought to be strung up and whipped.”

“What’s the fuss?” asks the child in a bored voice. “They’re just statues of aliens.”

“Actually, the human who did that was rewarded with the governorship of Antares III,” I inform them.

“What are you talking about?” says the man.

“The second human conquest of the Antares system was led by Commander Lois Kiboko,” I begin. “She defaced or destroyed more than 3,000 statues. Many were physical representations of our deity, and since she and her crew were devout believers in one of your religions, she felt that these were false idols and must be destroyed.”

“Well,” the man replies with a shrug, “it’s a small price to pay for her saving you from the Lodinites.”

“Perhaps,” I say. “The problem is that we had to pay a greater price for each successive savior.”

He stares at me, and there is an awkward silence. Finally I suggest that we visit the Palace of the Supreme Tyrant.

“You seem such a docile race,” she says awkwardly. “I mean, so civilized and unaggressive. How did your gene pool ever create a real, honest-to-goodness tyrant?”

The truth is that our gene pool was considerably more aggressive before a seemingly endless series of alien conquests decimated it. But I know that this answer would make them uncomfortable, and could affect the size of my tip, so I lie to them instead. (I am ashamed to admit that lying to aliens becomes easier with each passing day. Indeed, I am sometimes amazed at the facility with which I can create falsehoods.)

“Every now and then each race produces a genetic sport,” I say, and I can see she believes it, “and we Antareans are so docile, to use your expression, that this particular one had no difficulty achieving power.”

“What was his name?”

“I do not know.”

“I thought you took fourteen years’ worth of history courses,” she says accusingly, and I can tell she thinks I am lying to her, whereas every time I have actually lied she has believed me.

“Our language has many dialects, and they have all evolved and changed over 36,000 years,” I point out. “Some we have deciphered, but to this day many of them remain unsolved mysteries. In fact, right at this moment a team of human archaeologists is hard at work trying to uncover the Tyrant’s name.”

“If it’s a dead language, how are they going to manage that?”

“In the days when your race was still planetbound, there was an artifact called the Rosetta Stone that helped you translate an ancient language. We have something similar—ours is known as the Bosperi Scroll—that comes from the Great Tyrant’s era.”

“Where is it?” asks the woman, looking around.