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That Thing Over There
by: DOMINIC GREEN
Dominic Green has been publishing colorful, unusual SF adventures for
the last few years in the UK. Green himself, for the moment, is a man
of mystery. David Pringle, of Interzone, says: "I've put word about
that I'm trying to contact him urgently, but no one seems to know
where he is. He's generally thought to be abroad, possibly in the
Netherlands or Germany, working on short term contracts to do with the
Year 2000 computer bug. That's his field of expertise, apparently, and
no doubt it will be keeping him (and others like him) extremely busy
all this year. I did hear tell from him about a year ago that he'd
written a novel and was hoping to find a publisher;but, it seems,
without success so far." This story is from Interzone, where he has
been appearing intermittently, and is an alternate history piece
unusually filled with SF stuff.
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It was the Summer of 2001, Year One, as all the MTV broadcasts proudly
announced. And yes, I hear you sniggering behind your cybernetic
replacement hands when I say "MTV", just as I sniggered at my
grandfather when he said "gramophone" instead of "CD." But despite our
appearance now, we were all young then, and On Top of the
World. Literally.
The Chinese Government had recently decided to allow expeditions into
the Khabachen district of the Qinghai Autonomous Region, Tibet in all
but name, an area that had previously been politically sensitive due
to the destruction by the government of several large monasteries. The
monasteries had been built there due to the elevation and seclusion of
the place, well away from everything apart from poor people (who get
everywhere) and yeh-teh, that peculiar high-country word which means,
literally, "That Thing Over There," and refers to a thing that walks
on two legs like a man, but is not. The monastic authorities had
chosen well. The Khabachen valley was situated on a plateau which had
been produced when the lava of ten volcanoes, now extinct, filled a
high valley dammed by ice. In this respect, it was very much like the
rest of the Tibetan plateau, only higher. The medical authorities in
England recommended that we all spend a month in Lhasa acclimatizing
to the effects of high altitude; Chinese government advisors
counselled a further two months in Lhasa in state-provided apartments,
which, I was later to discover, cost ten times as much as the
equivalent ethnicminority accommodation, 50 percent of which went
toactual Tibetans, and 40 percent of which went to that peculiar place
to which percentages disappear in China.
The five monasteries in the area had been built by a subdivision of
the Tibetan buddhist faith known as the Brown Hat Sect, a group about
which our contacts in the relativelymodern Yellow Hat ruling sect
could provide little information, and which was said to have been a
transparent front for the continued practice of Bonpoba, the original
and faintly unpleasant religion of the Tibetan plateau. The Brown
Hatters had been repeatedly purged for claiming to have been present
in the highlands before the arrival of Padmasambhava, and to be the
guardians of a place where an entire country of demons had been
exorcised by the drivers of the Great Vehicle. Good ordinary Buddhists
were cautioned against approaching the area with tales of yeh-teh. In
much the same way, perhaps, good ordinary present-day Communists have
been discouraged from approaching Chinese army bases with stories of
radioactivity and live ammunition practice.
According to legend, Nyatri Tsanpo, the first King of Tibet, had
fought a great battle with cunning sorcerers here a thousand years
ago, and had forced them back to this highland region, where they were
finally destroyed, but not before their lord sorcerer, the wicked
Nyiga Gedgyinigesa, had worked a great spell which froze 10,000 of
their army into stone statues, awaiting the time when they would march
down once more and make war upon the world. This story had been
written by a ninth-century buddhist chronicler - it had happened a
thousand years ago then, too - and it was evident that he had heard
much of the Terra Cotta Army of the tomb of the Yellow Emperor of Qin
China. It was possible that the chronicler, upon hearing of the Army
and its similar intended function, had wished to curry favor with the
powerful Chinese factions that have always been part of the Tibetan
landscape, and to make clear, of course, that the idea had been had by
Tibetans first. In any case, the prospect of discovering another Terra
Cotta Army was not absent from our minds as we drove into the
highlands to set up our base camp.
Satellite photographs, computer-enhanced using techniques previously
only available to the military to bring out straight-line details such
as walls and roads, already told us that traces of man-made structures
existed in the high Khabachen valley, and that, furthermore, Mon Sa,
the Tibetan village at which we had been instructed we could set up
our Base Camp by the Chinese government, had previously existed in no
less than three separate shifting locations. Driving into the village,
our architectural expert, Chak Kuang, identified two earlier
settlements placed by Tocharian and Chi'ang Tibetan cultures. The
present inhabitants, living in metal-and-plastic communes built from
materials obviously transported from lower altitudes, were the
descendants of Tibetan lowlanders driven up here by recent forcible
land appropriations by Han Chinese. No wonder, then, that our hosts
pointed wildly up the mountains and told us that an army of yeh-teh
existed just over the hill. We could not investigate this, of course,
as "just over the hill" was still vertically the distance from Tower
Bridge to Westminster, and looked, furthermore, unattainable for any
vehicle not possessing fur and four legs; but we contented ourselves
with the thought that, if there was an army of frozen sorcerers up
there, they would stay frozen another day beyond a thousand years.
About halfway through the evening of the first night, however, our
specialist, Janine Groening, burst in a highly agitated state into the
prefab hut which we wereoccupying. I remember her grabbing my arm and
dragging me outside.
She claimed to have discovered the third location of Mon Sa; an
ancient, loess-covered structure only a few inches down in the soil,
constructed of what she insisted was the same poured concrete used by
the Roman Empire for the production of its major architecture. Now, it
was not quite as beyond the bounds of possibility as one might think
for a Roman cultural outpost to have existed in Tibet; the Parthian
Empire had captured 10,000 Roman soldiers at the battle of Carrhae in
53 B.C., and resettled them on its considerable borders, which had
abutted Han Chinese borders in many places following the Han conquest
of the Tarim Basin. However, I could not quite lend credence to such a
radical reinterpretation of history, and indeed, upon reexamination of
the stonework, Janine was forced to conclude that the masonry was not
Roman, for it was made of standardized non-cuboid blocks which
tessellated in three dimensions. Whatever stresses acted on this
masonry would meet with resistance in no matter which way they pushed.
Furthermore, the walls appeared to possess rusted reinforcing iron
staples driven completely through them, in the way in which fanciful
theory would have the Incas building Quito. The rusting of the staples
had been retarded by the fact that, like the ones that hadn't been
discovered in Quito, they appeared to have been plated with silver.
At this point we were simultaneously both tremendously excited and
extremely wary, particularly of our Communist hosts, for there were
entire Viking armies full of axes to grind concerning preternaturally
advanced civilizations being discovered on the Tibetan Plateau. No
doubt, we joked with one another as we worked to uncover the walls, we
would also find perfectly preserved specimens of Peking Men wearing
Chinese Army uniforms. Therefore, our preliminary investigations were
confined to searching the entire structure minutely for traces of
chocolate-bar wrappers and cigarettes. We were most excited by the
prospect of finding something still more impressive on the other side
of the hill; if the other side of the hill had proven to hold a
previously undiscovered monastery, or a boring old settlement, we
would at that juncture had been terribly disappointed. However, it did
not, and we weren't.
We started out extremely early in the morning, at around five, in
order to catch the Chinese secret policemen even Chak Kuang was
convinced were busy up there with their scaffolding and mechanical
diggers. The trail was harder than if it had been set with nails, and
our lungs felt as if they were filled with white hot hydrazine. Our
faces were ghost-pale with sun-block factor n. Being up in the Tibetan
highlands was the nearest a common man of my century could come to
being in outer space. The sky up there growspurple, rather than red,
in the evening, I swear it. If you whirl your hand through the air,
there is no air there. Now, I am too old to travel on orbital
transports; no company will insure me, with such a weak heart. But
once I stood on the threshold of the stars.
We stood on the crest of the hill, and, ours being a multiracial
party, swore in seven languages simultaneously. There, on the saddle
between two mountains, stood an entire city never seen before by
Western Man - the city we were to come to call Voorniin.
Eastern Man had been here before, of course; we found a Chinese Kilroy
Was Here inscription on the western pillar of the great gate, still
standing after however many thousand years. It was modern, of course,
but quite old; some soldier had been up here with a motorized
battalion, perhaps in the early 1950s, the days of territorial
confrontation between China and India. It stood right next to a second
inscription from the first Han Dynasty. Those two soldiers had visited
this city a thousand years apart, and no other soul except perhaps the
odd Tibetan yak-herd had struggled up here during all that
time. Neither soldier had truly known what he was seeing.
The walls were built of the same queer interlocked blocks. The
streets, as we moved in through the great iron gate, were paved and
pavemented and possessed closed sewers. There had at some point been
glass in all the windows. Zanskar, a thousand miles to the south, and
perhaps the world's one remaining nation which can claim to be
aboriginally Tibetan in its culture, possesses one pane of glass in
its entire 200-mile extent, and that one in the palace of a king.
Here we were finding glass panes in the houses of the poor; and in
every house we found the yeh-teh.
The corpses were many, and mummified by the high altitude, aridity and
cold in a way that an Egyptian pyramid full of refrigerators would
never have been able to achieve. They still had their hair, which was
a uniform ashen white, as if the hair of those who in life had been
blondes and brunettes had grown silver in a thousand years of
post-mortal aging up here on the mountainside while they waited for us
to come.
They had a written language, which seemed to be alphabetic. However,
once this single similarity was dispensed with, it appeared to have no
connection whatsoever with even the oldest of Tibetan scripts. They
wove cloth in volumes which suggested they possessed looms, and indeed
in airy stone chambers just off the main thoroughfare we found a great
battery of such devices. They had hypocausts and copper piping
connecting every room. In one high tower at the extreme northern end
of the city we discovered a lacquered wooden tube containing two
smashed lenticular pieces of glass, suggesting an acquaintance with
telescopes and astronomy. Constellations were found drawn all over the
domed ceiling of one chamber, along with a wooden astrolabe, all of
this wood obviously having required to be transported here from some
considerable distance. The constellations looked like nothing known to
man, with the exception of Scorpio, which I recognized immediately; I
remembered having read in a book long ago that Scorpio wasone of the
few constellations whose stars had not moved markedly relative to the
Sun since Ptolemy's original classification, so that its present-day
form was still similar to the form it had taken before the birth of
Christ.
It was at that point that Angela Reinicke, our paleoanthropologist,
was discovered sitting holding a corpse's wrist, as if taking its
pulse, staring mutely down at the hand.
It was not only that the corpse had five fingers and one thumb, nor
even that the other hand was exactly the same. Mutations of this sort,
although uncommon, were not impossible, after all. It was the fact
that the last six corpses she had checked had also had the same
characteristics. I, too, had had a weird feeling every time I had
passed one of the frozen corpses, but, like the four fingers on Mickey
Mouse, it had been a thing which one noticed without realizing why it
seemed wrong.
We had been so busy flabbergasting ourselves with what could be found
inside the walls that we failed to concern ourselves with what might
lie outside them. However, the sound of Janine Groening calling from
the scree-littered slopes beyond the city drew us out of the gate.
She had found a metal arrowhead embedded in the mortar of an outlying
wall, inscribed with primitive symbols familiar from grave finds from
the Ch'iang culture of pre- Buddhist Tibet. This in itself was the
first truly significant find of the day, which may sound odd; but to
an archaeologist a city totally unrelated to any culture found before
is an exasperating quantity until he has some external evidence with
which to paste it into the palimpsest of Time. Now we knew that these
people, whoever they had been, had come into conflict with the Ch'iang
culture, which could be dated back as far as 4,000 B.C. until the time
of the Yarlung Dynasty of the European Dark Ages. Now we had a
temporal box into which to put our culture - albeit a very big one.
We also found bodies outside the walls, after a cursory search; bodies
in rough but workmanlike military graves, many dressed in Tibetan
peasant robes that hadn't changed much in the two thousand years
between then and now. You must understand that in those days polyester
was almost unknown in Tibet. They appeared to have been buried with
military honors, which in their cases amounted to messages in Greek
and Sanskrit scripts - at that time both quite widely-used languages
in Bactria, to the southwest of the Tibetan plateau - scratched into
rough headstones. We were surprised to find not only Sanskrit
dedications, but also some in the Wen-yan Chinese script, and a single
headstone written in the rarely-found Tocharian language, an
Indo-European tongue known to have once been spoken in what is now
Western China. This last was a particularly interesting find, for it
proved that the Tocharian-speaking peoples (as opposed to the
Tocharian peoples themselves, who were of course Completely Different)
had existed in the Western Regions around two hundred years before
their previous supposed first colonization of the area. All these
peoples, it seemed, had come all theway up into these highlands which
it had taken us thirty days to penetrate using modern motor vehicles,
and fought, sustaining terrible casualties, against the people of the
walled city. We counted twenty thousand grave markers in all.
However, it was the words spelled out in Chinese on Janine's arrowhead
that sent a chill down our spines - and at those altitudes, it takes a
lot to send a chill down already frozen vertebrae.
The words were DEATH TO DEMONS.
At first we imagined that these widely differing armies had been
fighting each other for the great prize of the city. After examination
of the ruins of siegeworks and collapsed supply-tunnels all about the
city, however, we realized that all these many thousand soldiers had
come all this way up here as a unified, multinational force purely in
order to confront the city's inhabitants and kill them. This would
have had to have been a most single-minded enterprise, for some of
these soldiers must have come from the environs of modern-day China,
and the gear and clothing of soldiers found in certain graves
suggested that a Hsiung-Nu force had accompanied the Chinese
detachment. Cementing an alliance between the nomad Hsiung-Nu and the
Chinese would have been a feat well nigh impossible at that time, for
the Qin Dynasty were shortly to involve themselves in walling off the
entire continent from their nomadic neighbours, such was the enmity
between them. Chak Kuang, for one, refused to believe that the troops
of this army could have originated in China. To move such a body of
men and weapons over a thousand miles beyond the Chinese border
through heaven alone knew how many petty warlords' sovereign
territories would have required a cooperation from the Tibetan people
never since seen in the history of these two nations, plus the
presence of an enemy mutually threatening enough to move both peoples
to join forces against it.
Due to the Burning of the Books by Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, little
record survives of that early period of Chinese history, almost as if
the Emperor had wanted to hide some dramatic or traumatic
event. Perhaps this act of genocide against a peaceful, hill- dwelling
people had been an episode in his reign which had excited adverse
comment. After all, how much remains to us of the ancient Chavin or
Nazca cultures from before the time of the Inca? And how much
truly-related European history would have survived had the Nazis won
at El Alamein and Stalingrad? Can we be sure that the history which
did survive those two battles is entirely unblemished?
It was at that point that we noticed that an assumption we had made
regarding the pre- death ages of the corpses was sorely mistaken. We
had assumed that all the bodies found in the city had simply been
those of the aged and decrepit, who had been left behind at home when
the city's men and womenfolk went to war. However, the discovery of
asmall and silver-haired child in one of the many temples put paid to
that theory. It seemed on subsequent reanalysis of the bodies that,
queer as it might have seemed,every single inhabitant of the city had
been an albino. Possibly, we reasoned, the superficially strange
appearance of the city's people had inspired their lowland neighbours
to attack them.
However, it was judged that the position of the child's body, on the
temple altar with no less than thirteen exquisitely-crafted steel
daggers driven through its vital organs, was a more likely cause of
enmity. Over sixty further small skulls were found neatly stacked on a
rotating spiked drum, oddly reminiscent of a news-agent's book stack,
at the rear of the temple. And yes, they had had steel. Steel swords
were in the minority, however; instead, we discovered paranoiacally
extensive armories of huge steel darts which could be linked by chains
and fired from simultaneously triggered ballista-type devices mounted
on the walls, perfectly preserved in the waterless Tibetan air. The
sinew-and- tendon ropes used to power the catapults had split and
rotted in the cold, but otherwise many of the weapons almost seemed as
if they might still be serviceable today - when I say today, of
course, I mean yesterday, in the first years of this aging century.
The number of Chinese, Tibetan, Persian, Tartar and Tocharian soldiers
found dead and buried outside the walls with leg injuries bore witness
to the ballistae having been highly effective in their heyday.
However, despite the much-trumpeted effectiveness of Asiatic compound
projectile weapons, the number of war casualties found buried close to
the city walls was far lower than the huge quantity of uninjured
corpses found in and around the camp of the besiegers. Many of the
exhumed soldiers had toes and fingers missing, a fact which pointed to
the ill state of preparation of their armies in ascending to such a
frigid altitude.
The city-dwellers's way of life had been violent and unpleasant -
there appeared to have been no room for failure in what we were soon
to come to call Niige society, and graphic depictions of incompetent
high officials being ignominiously cast into pits of wolves and tigers
abounded. Their society was a democracy, one of the few ever found
independently of the Greek model; but non-Niige were not allowed to
vote. They were, however, allowed to die, and Tibetan, Hsiung-Nu and
Chinese slaves farmed the fields and mined the mines. When the miners
died, the unnecessary expense of transporting them to the surface was
eschewed; they were cast into an ice cave on the lower levels, where
they froze gruesomely into the faces of subterranean waterfalls when
the ice flowed over the years. I have not personally visited the ice
caves, but the first spelunkers to penetrate down that far were driven
to swear they would never venture into the Voorniin Mine again.
They mined iron, of course, not gold or silver, although these metals
might have also existed high on this igneous plateau. However, they
were less plentiful than iron, and less useful; the Niige appeared to
have learned the lesson in advance that history is filled with races
whose sparkling hoards of gold and silver were plundered by invading
hordesof iron-miners. The Niige were, I am convinced, the "Sons of
Reflected Light," those semi-mythical creatures who had descended to
the Chinese lowlands and contributed to the Qin and Zhou cultures
their unfair head start of early knowledge in the fields of medicine,
philosophy, and magic. And what does one do with a benefactor who
demonstrates his superior knowledge to one's dirtbound primitive
people? Why, one fears him, and to fear is to hate, and to hate is to
destroy.
But there were other reasons why the Chinese and Tibetan inhabitants
of that region would have feared and hated the alien culture. These
reasons were plastered all over their walls and carved into their
caryatid columns in what had once been glorious technicolor. They did
not appear to worship gods as such; rather, they appeared to have
transcended this meaningless extravagance. What we had at first taken
for temples of human sacrifice were in fact anatomical research
theaters and chambers for the interrogation of luckless victims taken
in battle. Anatomical examinations were carried out with the subject
still alive, for preference - a most logical conclusion,
since how can any truly conscientious healer truly understand the
functioning of a living breathing human, unless he has cut a man up
while he is still alive and breathing?
The child in the temple, we were soon to discover, had not been
sacrificed, but had instead been the subject of a dissection to
determine whether or not Niige War Savants had been able to infect him
with a particularly virulent strain of cholera prevalent at that time
in the city. Had he been so infected, say the notes that they had
left, they would have contaminated a few more children and hurled them
over the walls into the enemy. According to their journals, they had
tried the same thing with the corpses of yaks a week or so earlier,
only to be disappointed, as yaks seemed not to be sufficiently similar
to human beings to communicate the bacillus. Had the small boy been
spared due to the efficacy of yaks, the journals tell us, he would
have been eaten. Adults, of course, were needed in the fight against
the Zuiev, or Non-Niige, whereas children could easily be replaced;
and once a child had been allowed to die to prevent a drain on the
food bins, it would be a shame to waste such a handy meat supply.
Their word for themselves - their tongue was eventually decoded, with
the aid of the two Cray computers run by the BABEL project in Los
Angeles and reference to Elamite, a language isolate from ancient
Mesopotamia - means, quite simply "Us. Their word for anyone who was
not "Niige," "Us," was "Zuie." This term was at best contemptuous, and
at worst had the same register which one would use to describe a
trained animal. The Niige's ancestors had originated in the lowlands
south of the Himalaya, a land called by them Adamdi; having been
persecuted by numerous kings for unspecified religious practices, they
had then fled to the northern uplands where they had served the Bon
priests of Tibet as jewelers and brewers, bringing with them trades
their people had presumably learned in Mesopotamia. However, with the
birth of the first true Niige child - an event the Bon had interpreted
as an evil omen, and the Niige's ancestors as a sure sign of the favor
of the gods - local opinion had turned gradually against
thesoutherners, and they had been forced still further into the
highlands, where they had taken great pride in constructing a city
where no city should have been able to be built. However, this had
not been the end of their misfortunes, for, alarmed at the thought
that the city of the Bai Ch'iang, the "White Tibetans," was
flourishing and was, further-more, now termed the "Black Jewel of the
Mountains," the neighboring kings of Qin, and the chieftains of the
Hsiung-Nu, Yueh-Chih, and Ch'iang, decided jealously to march against
the Niige. And they brought a great army into the highlands, the
greatest that had ever been seen by Man, and laid siege to the City of
Voorniin, Beloved of Fate. This last sentence is a verbatim quote from
the penultimate passage of a hundred-year history carved into the wall
of a city whose stone blocks were hacked bodily out of granite by a
people possessing little more than the hands on the ends of their
arms.
This penultimate passage should be tragic, and it would have been,
like the Hittite inscriptions on the coming of the Sea Peoples which
break off in midsentence, had it not been for the fact that it was the
penultimate passage. The last passage had been carved by a firm,
unshaking, absolutely self-assuredly deliberate six-fingered hand, and
went as follows:
"Witness my hand these one hundred and seventeen years past the
foundation of the City of the Chosen; I, Rezadrakedel, philosopher and
counselor to our nation, take it upon myself to ensure the survival of
our seed. Therefore, I decree that, like wasps in winter, we shall
take ourselves to the insides of our houses and die, for there shall
come a time when we shall rise again."
That phrase - "philosopher and counselor" - has been translated as
"priest-king," and even "warrior-prophet," by some of the more
sensational newspapers. However, as I have said before, the Niige had
no priests. They were not scared even of Heaven. The phrase
"Gediniyezal," from which the English has been translated, means
something between "knower" and "advisor." Rezadrakedel had been no
priest. He had been a scientist, or the closest thing to one that any
Iron Age city could produce; and one of the hobbies of scientists is
the prediction of future scientific advancement. Rezadrakedel had
doubtless seen many innovations and advancements in his seventy-year
lifespan, especially when one considers that his city's entire history
had only spanned a hundred years. He must also have known that summer
never came to the high plains where the City was situated, and that
its inhabitants must needs trade iron and bright worthless stones with
the peoples of the warm valleys on all sides in order to obtain food,
playing one ethnically prejudiced despot against another. Indeed, it
appeared to have been only the alliance of these despots in the
assault upon the City that brought the Niige to their unaccustomed
kneeling position, for the mighty defenses of Voorniin's curtain walls
do not appear to have been much dented by the puny forces that their
primitive attackers were able to drag up the mountain with them.
It is, of course, well nigh impossible to raise proper siege engines
to such an altitude.The fact that the Niige themselves appeared to
have managed it, and to have housed entire batteries of such devices
within their city walls, is immaterial. The Niige died of starvation,
not of sword-wounds; they had known they were about to be forced into
surrender by diminishing food reserves, and had so inscribed bad-loser
curses in the names of nebulous Bon and Elamite demons in whom they no
longer believed all round the gateways of their stronghold, and had
committed businesslike suicide, allowing their enemies to enter the
city and butcher all who had not obeyed the philosopher/counselor's
decree. And the butchers had been thorough - old Chinese inscriptions
found on the wall of a deep well by one wall of the stronghold
announce that three Niige survivors had been discovered attempting to
hide down here and were "killed immediately." Not tortured. Not
buried alive. But "killed immediately." Like lepers. Like a virus that
might spread down from the mountains and infect the human race.
The Chinese and Tibetan warlords had been fore-sighted enough to
realize that here the Gods had been kind enough to place a terrible
threat to the security of their kingdoms in a location where it could
grow only very slowly, and could be effectively dealt with using
sufficiently single-minded force. Rezadrakedel, however, had perhaps
been even wiser. As a scientist, he knew that Men could think of new
ways to tackle almost any problem, and he had doubtless seen primitive
aboriginal Zuiev bow down in wonder before the splendors of his high
City and proclaim them to be nothing short of sorcery. Why, then,
should things thought of as sorcery by his own kind not also come to
pass one day?
Rezadrakedel might have observed, as did Roger Bacon in medieval
England, that slave bodies thrown into the corpse pits in the mines
did not spoil. He might have looked to the limitations of even his own
scalpel-sharp brain. He might have considered that, astounding though
it might sound that the frozen corpses of his people might one day be
found and restored to life, it was not beyond the bounds of
possibility. A race of men might one day exist who were to him
technologically as he was to a Zuiev peasant; a race of men who might
be stupid enough to dig up his entire people, resurrect them, and let
them loose again upon the world. Is it a coincidence that the most
perfectly- preserved of the corpses discovered at Voorniin were those
of Niige aristocrats who threw themselves into a deep pit on top of a
hundred slave corpses, and then had a thousand gallons of water poured
down onto their bodies when the main water butt that supplied the
entire mine was deliberately broken by Zuiev slaves?
I have stood on a man-made tower on the shoulders of a mountain range
so high that for an ordinary human being to struggle up to it is akin
to a deep-sea anglerfish swimming upriver and hurling itself up Alpine
waterfalls like a salmon. And that tower had been built by people over
two hundred years before the birth of that man the Romans nailed to
History as an arbitrary milestone, Christ. People - but not humans. If
they'd been human, they would surely never have shone so brightly in a
place where even a struck match has trouble burning.
Oh, they had human DNA all right; there was of course an initial
"Pack-Yaks of the Gods" period of insistence by bearded lunatics that
the Niige had been Alien Thetans from Outer Space, but this had been
dispelled semi-instantly by the very first tests of genetic material
brought down from Voorniin, "The Place Where We Live." The genetic
tests proved that the genetic basis for the Niige had indeed been
human, and that they had possessed a genetic structure 90-odd percent
identical to that of humans. However, so does a mountain gorilla. It
was quite quickly realized that there was something new about the
Niige - headlines screamed such things as "Asiatic Super City Found on
Tibetan Plateau," "Beijing Claims Chinese Descended From Proto-
Tibetans," and "Baghdad Claims Supermen Still Live in Mesopotamia."
The race was on to identify one's ancestry with a people whom,
paradoxically, one's ancestors had been attempting only a couple of
thousand years previously to exterminate with extreme prejudice.
And then the news came from laboratories in Switzerland that sperm
cells had been discovered still alive in Niige corpses.
The discovery was natural enough; frozen mammoths had been dug up in
Siberia, and certain deranged scientists had insisted that it was now
possible to clone a mammoth as a consequence. When "ice men" had been
discovered frozen in the passes of the Alps, equally differently sane
women had written to the authorities responsible to insist that they
be allowed to have Cro-Magnon Babies through modern genetic
technology. Now, however, what had been dug up was not a Neanderthal,
but a putative Superman, and modern genetic technology had moved
twenty years further on. Rich women flocked to the inevitable spate of
discreet clinics in their thousands as frozen sperm samples went
missing from bio labs and museums. The demand for albino and
polydactyloid sperm in normal workaday sperm banks, meanwhile, went
unaccountably ballistic. Within two years, the number of albino
inhabitants of Beverly Hills had multiplied tenfold as divorced old
actresses bore superbeings like breed cows. Everything in our society
could be sold then, even frozen jism hacked from a dead man's gonads.
But were the things they were birthing supermen? Evolutionists have
never argued that there is such a thing as a superior or inferior
species, only one more or less well adapted to prevailing conditions
which may change at any time. Certainly the Niige seem better adapted
to succeed under present conditions than we do; over the past few
years we have seen their children going through High School, West
Point and Harvard, attaining PhD's, knighthoods, and Nobel Prizes with
effortless ease.
It's been stated that they have superior pattern-recognition skills,
superior all-round cognitive ability, enhanced this, hyperevolved
that. However, as I hear such explanationsI cannot help recalling the
thousand-year-dead face of the little boy torn apart upon the altar.
Can it not simply be that the Niige have always possessed little or no
concern for life of any sort? Was the strength of will to push human
beings to their almost certain deaths in the name of experimentation
not an immense benefit to the researches of Nazi scientists at
Auschwitz? Is "success at any price" not always going to defeat
"success tempered with compassion" in any enterprise?
I have submitted this manuscript to a number of national
newspapers. All of them are owned by Niige. Short of publishing the
document on the Web, I see little hope of ever seeing it reach a wide
audience. Am I voicing the same concerns, perhaps, as were voiced by
old-money Weimar Berliners who looked from their crumbling mansions to
see successful nouveau riche Jews and homosexuals strutting round the
Unter Den Linden? Only history will tell.
Rezadrakedel, who was discovered in an ice-chunk of great size at the
very bottom of the mine, was removed and shipped inside his watery
grave to New York in a refrigerated container. I pay my reduced fare
every morning on the subway to go and see him. Somehow, he contrived
to die with his eyes open, and though his eyes must surely have dried
and cracked to unusable blisters in his face before the ice of the
cave closed over him, they still stare out from under a foot of ice at
parties of schoolchildren gawping at his silver hair and perfectly-
preserved fine garments. Although I can see from my reflection in the
ice surface that I have grown old in the interim, the Gediniyezal has
not aged a day. The surface of the ice has been cut flat and polished
using specially-developed techniques, and there is a red dot on the
museum floor where visitors may stand and ensure that Exhibit 234A,
Rezadrakedel, warrior-prophet of Voorniin, is looking them straight in
the eye.
And, despite the fact that it must be fearfully cold in there, the old
bastard is smiling.
