Free Gateways by Elizabeth Anne Hull

that?”
    The alien brought its forearms together and then apart again. The ever-present clouds seemed to converge, bringing darkness upon a patch of the worldstone, till deep black reigned across the center. Wer caught a pointlike glitter . . . and another . . . and then two more . . . and another pair . . .
    “Stars,” announced Anna Arroyo. “Six of them, arrayed in a rough hexagon . . . with a final one in the middle, off-center . . . I’m searching the online constellation catalogs. . . . Damn. All present-day matches include some stars that are below seventh magnitude, so it’s unlikely . . .”
    “Please do not curse,” said the islander, Patri Menelaua. “Let’s recall that the topic at hand is time. Dates.
When.
Stars shift.” Still fondling the animatronic cross that hung from a chain around his neck, he added. “Try going retrograde . . .”
    The figure of Jesus seemed to squirm, a little, away from his touch. Anna frowned, but nodded. “I’m on it. Backsifting and doing a whole sky match-search in one hundred year intervals. This could take a while.”
    Wer grunted. Held back a moment. Then hurriedly blurted: “Seven!”
    The scholar and the rich man turned to him. Wer had to swallow to gather courage, managing a low croak.
    “Try the seven maidens. You know. The . . .” He groped for a name.
    “Pleiades,” the scholar finished for him. “Yes, that would be a good guess—”
    The Filipina woman interrupted. “Got you. Scanning time-drift of just that one cluster, back . . . back . . . yes! It’s a good match. The Pleiades, just under five thousand years ago. Wow.”
    Dr. Nguyen nodded. “I expected something like this. Peng Xiao Wer, the box that formerly held the worldstone—please tell us, what did the inscription say?”
    Wer recited from memory.
    “Unearthed in Harappa, 1926 . . .” He then spoke the second half with an involuntary shiver. “Demon-infested. Keep in the dark.”
    “Harappa, yes,” Nguyen nodded, ignoring the other part. “A center of the Indus Valley culture . . . the poor third sister of the early days of urban civilization, after Mesopotamia and Egypt. Some think it was a stunted state—cramped, paranoid, and never fully literate. We don’t really know what happened to the Indus civilization. Abandoned about 1700 BCE , they say. Possibly a great flood weakened both main cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro.”
    He shook his head, and the elegant braids swished. “But this makes no sense! Why would it be speaking to us in archaic Chinese, a dialect from a millennium later? Harappa was buried under sand, by then!”
    Wer shrugged. “Shall I try to ask, sir?”
    The small man waved a hand in front of his face. “No. I am following a script of questions, prioritized by colleagues and associates around the world. We’ll keep to these points, then fill in gaps later. Go to the next set of characters, Peng Xiao Wer, if you would please.”
    Wer felt gratified, again, by Dr. Nguyen’s unfailing politeness. The gentleman had been well brought up, for sure, skilled at how best to treat underlings.
Perhaps I will get to work for him, forever.
Not a harsh fate to contemplate, so long as Ling and the baby could join Wer, at some point soon.
    He meant to prove his value to the man.
    Bending over the stone, Wer carefully sketched four more of the complicated figures. Professor Yang Shenxiu had provided these versions of the questions, in a style from long ago, in order to communicate with the entity within. Dr. Nguyen’s consortium could not wait for their own worldstone to learn modern Chinese. There wasn’t time.
    Not with the world in an uproar over dire things that were being said by the so-called Havana Artifact—another alien emissary-stone that an American astronaut recently retrieved from high orbit.
This
stone in front of Wer offered a way to check—in secret—on the stories being told by that other one in Washington. So far, they