Текст книги "The Six Directions of Space"

Автор книги: Alastair Reynolds

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“You mean, join the team analyzing those relics?”

“As a matter of fact, I want you to lead it.” He smiled; I could not tell if the idea had just occurred to him, or whether it had always been at the back of his mind. “You’ve already demonstrated the acuteness of your observations. I have no doubt that you will continue to uncover truths that the existing team has overlooked.”

“I can’t just… take over, like that.”

He looked taken aback. “Why ever not?”

“A few days ago, I was your prisoner,” I said. “Not long before that, you were torturing me. They’ve no reason to suddenly start trusting me, just on your say-so.”

“You’re wrong about that,” he said, fingering one of the knives strapped across his chest. “They’ll trust who I tell them to trust, absolutely and unquestioningly.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because that’s how we do things around here.”

* * *

So it was. I joined Qilian’s investigative team, immersing myself in the treasure trove of data and relics his people had pieced together in my absence. There was, understandably, a degree of reluctance to accept my authority. But Qilian dealt with that in the expected manner, and slowly, those around me came to a pragmatic understanding that it was either work with me or suffer the consequences.

Relics and fragments continued to fall into our hands. Sometimes the ships that intruded into the Infrastructure were damaged, as if the passage into our territory had been a violent one. Often, the subsequent encounter with one of our ships was enough to shake them to pieces, or at the very least dislodge major components. The majority of these shards vanished without a trace into the implacable machinery of the Infrastructure. Even if the khorkoiapparatus was beginning to fail, it was still more than capable of attending to the garbage left behind by its users. But occasionally, pieces lingered in the system (as if the walls had indigestion?), waiting to be swept up by Qilian’s ships, and eventually brought home to this moon.

As often as not, though, it was a trivial matter to classify the consignments, requiring only a glance at their contents. The work became so routine, in fact—and the quantity of consignments so high—that eventually I had no choice but to take a step back from hands-on analysis. I assembled six teams and let them get on with it, requiring that they report back to me only when they had something of note: a new empire, or something odd from one of those we already knew about.

That was when the golden egg fell into our hands. It was in the seventh month of my service under Qilian, and I immediately knew that it originated from a culture not yet known to us. Perhaps it was a ship, or part of one. The outer hull was almost entirely covered in a quilt of golden platelets, overlapping in the manner of fish scales. The only parts not covered by the platelets were the dark apertures of sensors and thruster ports, and a small, eye-shaped area on one side of the teardrop that we quickly identified as a door.

Fearing that it might damage the other relics if it exploded under our examinations, I ordered that the analysis of the egg take place in a different part of the mining structure. Soon, though, my concern shifted to the welfare of the egg’s occupants. We knew that there were beings inside it, even if we could not be sure if they were human. Scans had illuminated ghostly structures inside the hull: the intestinal complexity of propulsion subsystems, fuel lines, and tanks packed ingeniously tight, the fatty tissue of insulating layers, the bony divisions of armored partitions, the cartilaginous detailing of furniture and life-support equipment. There were even ranks of couches, with eight crew still reclining in them. Dead or in suspended animation, it was impossible to tell. All we could see was their bones, a suggestion of humanoid skeletons, and there was no movement of those bones to suggest respiration.

We got the door open easily enough. It was somewhat like breaking into a safe, but once we had worked out the underlying mechanism—and the curiously alien logic that underpinned its design—it presented no insurmountable difficulties. Gratifyingly, there was only a mild gust of equalizing pressure when the door hinged wide, and none of the sensors arrayed around the egg detected any harmful gases.

As far as we could tell, it was filled with an oxygen-nitrogen mix only slightly different from that aboard our own ships.

“What now?” Qilian asked, fingering the patch of hair beneath his lip.

“We’ll send machines aboard now,” I replied. “Just to be safe, in case there are any booby traps inside.”

He placed a heavy, thick-fingered hand on my shoulder. “What say we skip the machines and just take a look inside ourselves?” His tone was playful. “Not afraid, are we, Yellow Dog?”

“Of course not,” I answered.

“There’s no need to be. I’ll go in first, just in case there aresurprises.”

We walked across the floor, through the cordon of sensors, to the base of the attenuated metal staircase that led to the open door. The robots scuttled out of the way. My staff exchanged concerned glances, aware that we were deviating from a protocol we had spent weeks thrashing out to the last detail. I waved down their qualms.

Inside, as we already knew from the scans, the egg was compartmented into several small chambers, with 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 thoughtthey looked like lemurs. That’s because they are.’”

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, curled into fetal position. I could only see the back of his head: bald and waxy, scribed with fine white scars. Ridged cables dangled in the fluid, running toward what I presumed was a breathing apparatus, now hidden.

Qilian looked through one of the other windows. After a lengthy silence, he straightened himself and nodded. “Do you think he was their prisoner?”

“No way to tell, short of thawing him and out and seeing what he has to say on the matter,” Uugan said.

“Do what you can,” Qilian told Uugan. “I would very, very much like to speak to this gentleman.” Then he leaned in closer, as if what he was about to say was meant only for Uugan’s ears. “This would be an excellent time not to make a mistake, if you understand my meaning.”

* * *

I do not believe that Qilian’s words had any effect on Uugan; he was either going to succeed or not, and the difference between the two outcomes depended solely on the nature of the problem, not his degree of application to the task. As it happened, the man was neither dead nor brain dead, and his revival proved childishly simple. Many weeks were spent in preparation before the decisive moment, evaluating all known variables. When the day came, Uugan’s intervention was kept to a minimum: he merely opened the preservation vat, extracted the man from his fluid cocoon, and (it must be said, with fastidious care) removed the breathing apparatus. Uugan was standing by with all the tools of emergency medical intervention at his disposal, but no such assistance was required. The man simply convulsed, drew in several gulping breaths, and then settled into a normal respiratory pattern. But he had yet to open his eyes, or signal any awareness in the change of his surroundings. Scans measured brain activity, but at a level indicative of coma rather than consciousness. The same scans also detected a network of microscopic machines in the man’s brain and much of his wider nervous system. Though we could not see these implants as clearly as those we had harvested from the lemur, they were clearly derived from a different technology.

Where had he come from? What did he know of the phantoms?

For weeks, it appeared that we would have no direct answer to these questions. There was one thing, one clue, but we almost missed it. Many days after the man’s removal from the vat, one of Uugan’s technicians was working alone in the laboratory where we kept our new guest. The lights were dimmed and the technician was using an ultraviolet device to sterilize some culture dishes. By chance, the technician noticed something glowing on the side of the man’s neck. It turned out to be a kind of tattoo, a sequence of horizontal symbols that was invisible except under ultraviolet stimulation.

I was summoned to examine the discovery. What I found was a word in Arabic, Altair,meaning eagle, and a string of digits, twenty in all, composed of nine numerical symbols, and the tenth, what the pre-Mongol scholars called in their dead language thecaor circulusor figura nihili,the round symbol that means, literally, nothing. Our mathematics incorporates no such entity. I have heard it said that there is something in the Mongol psyche that abhors the very concept of absence. Our mathematics cannot have served us badly, for upon its back we have built a five-hundred-year-old galactic empire—even if the khorkoigave us the true keys to that kingdom. But I have also heard it said that our system would have been much less cumbersome had we adopted that Arabic symbol for nothing.

No matter; it was what the symbols told me that was important, not what they said about our choice of number system. In optimistic anticipation that he would eventually learn to speak, and that his tongue would turn out to be Arabic, I busied myself with preparations. For a provincial thug, Qilian had a library as comprehensive as anything accessible from NHK. I retrieved primers on Arabic, most of which were tailored for use by security operatives hoping to crack Islamist terror cells, and set about trying to become an interpreter.

But when the man awoke—which was weeks later, by which time it felt as if I had been studying those primers for half my life—all my preparations might as well have been for nothing. He was sitting up in bed, monitored by machines and watched by hidden guards, when I came into the room. Aside from the technician who had first noticed his return to consciousness, the man had seen no other human being since his arrival.

I closed the door and walked to his bedside. I sat down next to him, adjusting the blue silk folds of my skirt decorously.

“I am Yellow Dog,” I told him in Arabic, speaking the words slowly and carefully. “You are among friends. We want to help you, but we do not know much about you.”

He looked at me blankly. After a few seconds I added: “Can you understand me?”

His expression and response told me everything I needed to know. He spoke softly, emitting a string of words that sounded superficially Arabic without making any sense to me at all. By then I had listened to enough recordings to know the difference between Arabic and baby talk, and all I was hearing was gibberish.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I do not understand you. Perhaps if we started again, slower this time.” I touched a hand to my breast. “I am Yellow Dog. Who are you?”

He answered me then, and maybe it was his name, but it could just as easily have been a curt refusal to answer my question. He started looking agitated, glancing around the room as if it was only now that he was paying due regard to his surroundings. He fingered the thin cloth of his blanket and rubbed at the bandage on his arm where a catheter had been inserted. Once more I told him my name and urged him to respond in kind, but whatever he said this time was not the same as his first answer.

“Wait,” I said, remembering something, a contingency I had hoped not to have to use. I reached into my satchel and retrieved a printout. I held the filmy paper before me and read slowly from the adhan, the Muslim call to prayer.

My pronunciation must still not have been perfect, because I had to repeat the words three or four times before some flicker of recognition appeared behind his eyes and he began to echo what I was saying.

Yet even as he spoke the incantation, there was a puzzlement in his voice, as if he could not quite work out why we should be engaged in this odd parlor game.

“So I was half right,” I said, when he had fallen silent again, waiting for me to say something. “You know something of Islamic culture. But you do not understand anything I say, except when I speak words that have not been permitted to change in fifteen centuries, and even then you only just grasp what I mean to say.” I smiled, not in despair, but in rueful acknowledgment that the journey we had to make would be much longer and more arduous than I had imagined. Continuing in Mongol, so that he could hear my tongue, I said: “But at least we have something, my friend, a stone to build on. That’s better than nothing, isn’t it?”

“Do you understand me now?” he asked, in flawless Mongol.

I was astonished, quite unable to speak. Now that I had grown accustomed to his baldness and pallor, I could better appreciate those aspects of his face that I had been inclined to overlook before. He had delicate features, kind and scholarly. I had never been attracted to men in a sexual sense, and I could not say that I felt any such longing for this man. But I saw the sadness in his eyes, the homesick flicker that told me he was a long way from family and friends (such as I have never known, but can easily imagine), and I knew that I wished to help him.

“You speak our language,” I said eventually, as if the fact of it needed stating.

“It is not a difficult one. What is your name? I caught something that sounded like ‘filthy hound,’ but that cannot have been correct.”

“I was trying to speak Arabic. And failing, obviously. My name is Yellow Dog. It’s a code, an operational identifier.”

“Therefore not your real name.”

“Ariunaa,” I said softly. “I use it sometimes. But around here they call me Yellow Dog.”

“Muhunnad,” he said, touching his sternum.

“Muhunnad,” I repeated. Then: “If you understood my name—or thought you understood it—why didn’t you answer me until I spoke Mongolian? My Arabic can’t be that bad, surely.”

“You speak Arabic like someone who has only heard a whisper of a whisper of a whisper. Some of the words are almost recognizable, but they are like glints of gold in a stream.” He offered me a smile, as if it hurt him to have to criticize. “You were doing your best. But the version of Arabic I speak is not the one you think you know.”

“How many versions are there?”

“More than you realize, evidently.” He paused. “I think I know where I am. We are inside the Mongol Expansion. We were on the same track until 659, by my calendar.”

“What other calendar is there?”

“You count from the death of a warrior-deity; we count from the flight of the Prophet from Mecca. The year now is 1604 by the Caliphate’s reckoning; 999 by your own, 2226 by the calendar of the United Nations. Really, we are quibbling over mere centuries. The Smiling Ones use a much older dating system, as they must. The—”

I interrupted him. “What are you talking about? You are an emissary from a previously hidden Islamic state, that is all. At some point in the five hundred years of the Mongol Expansion, your people must have escaped central control to establish a secret colony, or network of colonies, on the very edge of the Infrastructure.”

“It is not like that, Ariunaa. Not like that at all.” Then he leaned higher on the bed, like a man who had just remembered an urgent errand. “How exactly did I get here? I had not been tasked to gather intelligence on the Mongols, not this time around.”

“The lemurs,” I answered. “We found you with them.”

I watched him shudder, as if the memory of something awful had only just returned. “You mean I was their prisoner, I think.” Then he looked at me curiously. “Your questions puzzle me, Ariunaa. Our data on the Mongols was never of the highest quality, but we had always taken it for granted that you understood.”

“Understood what?”

“The troubling nature of things,” he said.

* * *

The cable car pitched down from the boarding platform, ducking beneath the base of the immense walking platform. After a short while, it came to an abrupt halt, swaying slightly. Qilian pulled out his binoculars and focused on a detail under the platform, between the huge, slowly moving machinery of the skeletal support legs.

“There,” he said, passing me the binoculars.

I took them with trembling hands. I had been on my way to Muhunnad for one of our fruitless but not unpleasant conversational sessions, when Qilian’s men had diverted me to the cable car platform.

“What am I supposed to be looking at?”

“Press the stud on the side.”

I did so. Powerful gyroscopes made the binoculars twist in my hands, tracking and zooming in on a specific object, a thing hanging down from the underside like the weight on the end of a plumb line. I recalled now the thing I had seen the first time Qilian had accompanied me in the cable car, the thing that he had been examining with the binoculars. I had thought it was some kind of test probe or drilling gear being winched back into the platform. I saw now that I had been wrong.

I did need to see his face to know that I was looking at Muhunnad. He had been stuffed into a primitive spacesuit, blackened by multiple exposures to scorching heat and corrosive elements. They had him suspended from his feet, with his head nearest the ground. He was being lowered down toward one of those outgassing rifts in the surface of the Qing Shui moon.

“You can’t be doing this,” I said.

“If there was any other way,” Qilian said, in a tone of utter reasonableness. “But clearly there isn’t. He’s been dragging his heels, giving us nothing. Spoke too soon early on, confided too much in you, and chose to clam up. Obviously, we can’t have that.” Qilian opened a walnut-veneered cabinet and took out a microphone. He clicked it on and tapped it against his knee before speaking. “Can you hear me, Muhunnad? I hope your view is as spectacular as ours. I am speaking from the cable car that you may be able to see to your right. We are about level with your present position, although you will soon be considerably lower than us.”

“No,” I said.

Qilian raised a calming hand. He hadn’t even bothered to have me tied into the seat. “Do you hear that, Muhunnad? You still have an admirer.” Then he said: “Lower the line, please. Take him to half his present elevation.”

“Can you see that he’s told you everything he knows?” I asked, tossing the binoculars against the floor.

“He’s told us as little as he could get away with,” Qilian replied, placing a hand over the end of the microphone to muffle his words. “We could go through the usual rigmarole of conventional interrogation, but I think this will prove much more effective.”

“We’ll learn far more from him alive than dead.”

He looked at me pityingly. “You think I don’t know that? Of course I’m not going to kill him. But very soon—unless he chooses to talk—he’ll be wishing I did.”

The winch dropped Muhunnad to within fifteen or twenty aidsof the surface, just above the point where the outgassing material became opaque.

“I can hear you,” a voice said over the cable car’s speaker system. “But I have told you everything I intend to. Nothing you can do now will make any difference.”

“We’ll see, won’t we,” Qilian said. To me, confidingly, he said: “By now, he will be in extreme discomfort.

You and I are fine, but we have the benefit of a functioning life-support system. His suit is damaged. At the moment, his primary concern is extreme cold, but that will not remain the case for very much longer.

As he nears the fissure, it is heat that will begin to trouble him.”

“You can tell the woman—Ariunaa—that I am sorry it was necessary to withold information from her,”

Muhunnad said. “Her kindness was appreciated. I think she is the only one of you with a heart.”

“There’s no need for me to tell her anything,” Qilian replied. “She’s listening in. Aren’t you, Yellow Dog?”

Somewhat to my surprise, he passed me the microphone. “Talk to him. Reason with your favorite prisoner, if you imagine it will help.”

“Muhunnad,” I said. “Listen to me now. I have no reason to lie to you. Qilian means what he says. He’s going to put you through hell until he finds out what you know. I’ve seen him murder people already, just to get at the truth.”

“I appreciate the concern for my welfare,” he said, with a sincerity that cut me to the bone.

“Lower him to five aids,”Qilian said.

* * *

Is it necessary to document all that happened to Muhunnad? I suppose not; the essential thing is that the pain eventually became intolerable and he began to tell Qilian some of the things my master was desirous of knowing.

What we learned was: Muhunnad was a pilot, a man surgically adapted for optimum control of a ship with extreme Infrastructure agility. His implants were part of the interface system by which he flew his vehicle. It turned out that Muhunnad’s people had become aware of the breakdown of Infrastructure integrity many decades ago, long before it had come to our attention. The difference was, rather than pretending that the problem did not exist, or entrusting it to a single agent like myself, they had dedicated almost their entire state apparatus to finding a solution. Think of Qilian’s research, multiplied by a thousand. There were countless men and women like Muhunnad, brave angels tasked with mapping the weak spots in the