Текст книги "The Six Directions of Space"

Автор книги: Alastair Reynolds

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Infrastructure, the points of leakage, and learning something of the other empires beginning to spill into their own. They knew enough about the properties of those weak points; enough to slip through them, gather intelligence, and still return home. The rate of attrition was still high. Muhunnad was a criminal, convicted of a crime that would have been considered petty in our own society, but normally merited the death penalty in his. In his case, he had been offered the chance to redeem himself, by becoming a pilot.

They knew about us. They had been intercepting our lost message packets for years, and had even found a couple of our ships with living crew. That was how they had learned Mongolian. They also knew about dozens of other empires, including the lemurs.

“They caught me,” Muhunnad said, “as they catch any unwary traveler. They are to be feared.”

“They look so harmless,” Qilian answered.

“They are vicious beyond words. They are a hive society, with little sense of self. The beings you found, the dead ones, would have sacrificed themselves to ensure their cargo returned home intact. It did not mean that they did so out of any consideration for my well-being. But there are worse things than the lemurs out there. There are the beings we call the Smiling Ones. You will meet them sooner or later. They have been in space for millions of years, and their technology is only matched by their loathing for the likes of you and me.”

“Tell us about your state,” Qilian probed.

“We call it the Shining Caliphate. It is an empire encompassing seven thousand star systems, comprising twenty thousand settled worlds, half of which are of planet class or at least the size of major moons. A third of those worlds are terraformed or on the way to completion.”

“You are lying. If an empire of that size already existed, we would have seen signs of it.”

“That is because you are not looking in the right place. The Shining Caliphate is here,now, all around you. It occupied much the same volume as your own empire. It even has the same home world. You call it Greater Mongolia. We call it Earth.”

“Lies!”

But I knew Muhunnad was not lying to us. I think it likely that even Qilian knew it, too. He was a brutal man, but not a stupid or unimaginative one. But I do not think he could bare to contemplate his place in a universe in which Muhunnad spoke the truth. Qilian was a powerful man, with an empire of his own on the very edge of the one he was meant to serve. If our empire was a map spread across a table, then he controlled more than could be covered by the palm of a hand. Yet if what Muhunnad said was correct, then that map was but one unexceptional page in a vast atlas, each page a dominion in its own right, of which our own was neither the most powerful nor the most ancient. Set against such immensity, Qilian controlled almost nothing. For a man like him, that realization would have been intolerable.

But perhaps I am crediting him with too much intelligence, too much imagination, and he was simply unable to grasp what Muhunnad was telling us.

What he couldgrasp, however, was an opportunity.

I was with them when we brought Muhunnad to the room where the couch had been prepared. I had heard of the existence of the couch, but this was my first sight of it. Even knowing its function, I could not help but see it as an instrument of torture. Muhunnad’s reaction, to begin struggling against the guards who held him, showed that he saw the couch in similar terms. Behind the guards loomed white-coated doctors and technicians, including the Slav who had torn out my implant.

“This isn’t to hurt you,” Qilian said magnanimously. “It’s to help you.”

The couch was a skeletal white contraption, encumbered with pads and restraints and delicate hinged accessories that would fold over the occupant once they had been secured in place.

“I do not understand,” Muhunnad said, although I think he did.

“We have studied your implants and deduced something of their function,” Qilian said. “Not enough to learn everything about them, but enough to let you control one of our ships, instead of the one you were meant to fly.”

“It will not work.”

“No one is pretending it will be easy. But it is in your interests to do what you can to make it succeed.

Help us navigate the Infrastructure—the way you do, finding the weak points and slipping through them—and we will let you return home.”

“I do not believe you.”

“You have no option but to believe me. If you cannot assist me in this matter, you will have concluded your usefulness to me. Given the trouble I would get into if New High Karakorum learned of your existence, I would have no option but to dispose of you.”

“He means it,” I said forcefully. “Help us fly the ships, Muhunnad. Whatever happens, it’s better than staying here.”

He looked at me as if I was the one thing in the universe he was willing to trust. Given all that had happened to him since leaving his people, it did not surprise me in the slightest.

“Plug him in,” Qilian told the technicians. “And don’t be too tender about it.”

* * *

The name of the ship was the River Volga.She was half a liin length, her frontal stabilization spines suggesting the curving whiskers of a catfish. She had been a merchant vehicle once; later, she had been equipped for scouring the Parvan Tract for phantom relics, and, most recently, she had been hardened and weaponed for an exploratory role. She would carry six of us: Muhunnad, Qilian, Uugan, and two more members of the technical staff—their names were Jura and Batbayar—and myself. Next to her, identical in almost all respects, was the

Mandate of Heaven.

The only significant distinction between the two craft was that Muhunnad would be piloting the

River Volga,

while the

Mandate of Heaven

followed close behind, slaved to follow the same trajectory to within a fraction of an

aid.

The navigation and steering mechanisms of both ships had been upgraded to permit high-agility maneuvers, including reversals, close-proximity wall skimming, and suboptimal portal transits. It did not bear thinking about the cost of equipping those two ships, or where the funds had been siphoned from, but I supposed the citizens of the Kuchlug special administrative volume would be putting up with hardships for a little while longer.

We spent five days in shakedown tests before entering the Tract, scooting around the system, dodging planets and moons in high-gee swerves. During that time, Muhunnad’s integration into the harness was slowly improved, more and more ship systems brought under his direct control, until he reported the utmost confidence in being able to handle the River Volgaduring Infrastructure flight.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Truly, Ariunaa. This ship feels as much a part of me as anything I ever flew in the Shining Caliphate.”

“But indescribably less sophisticated.”

“I would not wish to hurt your feelings. Given your resources, you have not done too badly.”

The transit, when it came, was utterly uneventful. The Mandate of Heavenreported some minor buffeting, but this was soon negated following a refinement of the control linkage between the two ships.

Then we had nothing to do but wait until Muhunnad detected one of the points of weakening where, with a judicious alteration in our trajectory, we might slip from one version of the Infrastructure to another.

Did I seriously think that Qilian would keep his promise of returning Muhunnad to his own people? Not really, unless my master had hopes of forging some kind of alliance with the Shining Caliphate, to use as leverage against the central authority of New High Karakorum. If that was his intention, I did not think he had much hope of succeeding. The Caliphate would have every reason to despise us, and yet-given the demonstrably higher level of both their technology and their intelligence—there was nothing they could possibly want from us except craven submission and cowering remorse for the holocaust we had visited upon their culture nearly a thousand years earlier.

No; I did not think Muhunnad stood much chance of returning home. Perhaps he knew that as well. But it was better to pretend to believe in Qilian’s promises than incur his bored wrath back on the Qing Shui moon. At least this way, Muhunnad could continue to be materially useful to Qilian and, therefore, too valuable to hurt.

The detection of a weakening in the tunnel geometry, Muhunnad explained, was only just possible given the blunt sensibilities of our instruments. The Caliphate kept detailed maps of such things, but no record had survived his capture by the lemurs, and the information was too voluminous to be committed to memory. He recalled that there were four weak points in the section of Infrastructure we called the Parvan Tract, but not their precise locations or detailed properties.

No matter; he had every incentive to succeed. We overshot the first weakening, but the incident gave Muhunnad a chance to refine the manner in which he sifted the sensor data, and he was confident that he would not make the same error twice. Rather than attempt a reversal, it was agreed to push forward until we encountered the next weakening. It happened two days later, halfway to the Gansu nexus. This time, Muhunnad started to detect the subtle changes in the properties of the tunnel in time to initiate a hard slow-down, echoed by the Mandate of Heavenimmediately to our stern.

We had been warned that the passage would be rough; this was an understatement. Fortunately, we were all braced and ready when it came; we had had two minutes’ warning before the moment arrived.

Even then, the ship gave every indication of coming close to breakup; she whinnied like a horse, her structural members singing as if they had been plucked. Several steering vanes broke loose during the swerve, but the River Volgahad been equipped to withstand losses that would have crippled a normal ship; all that happened was that hull plates swung open and new vanes pushed out to replace the missing ones. Behind us, the Mandate of Heavensuffered slightly less damage; Muhunnad had been able to send correctional steering signals to her guidance system, allowing her to follow a less treacherous path.

And then we were back in the tunnel, traveling normally. To all intents and purposes, it was as if nothing had happened. We appeared to be still inside the Parvan Tract.

“We have become phantoms now,” Muhunnad informed us. “This is someone else’s Infrastructure.”

Qilian leaned over the control couch, where our pilot lay in a state of partial paralysis, wired so deeply into the River Volga’snervous system that his own body was but an incidental detail. Around us, the bridge instruments recorded normal conditions of Infrastructure transit.

“Where are we?”

“There’s no way of telling, not with these sensors. Not until we emerge.”

“In the Gansu nexus?”

“Yes,” he replied. “Or whatever theycall it. There will be risks; you will not have seen many phantoms emerge into your version of the nexus because most such ships will make every effort to slip through another weakening.”

“Why?”

He spoke as if the answer should have been obvious. “Because unless they are pilots like me, on specific intelligence-gathering missions, they would rather keep transitioning between versions of the Infrastructure, than emerge into what is likely to be a densely populated interchange. Eventually, they hope to detect the microsignatures in the tunnel physics that indicate that they have returned home.”

“Signatures that we can’t read,” I said.

“I will attempt to refine my interpretation of the sensor data. Given time, I may be able to improve matters. But that is some way off.”

“We’ll take our chances with Gansu,” Qilian said.

There was, as I understood it, a small but nonnegligible possibility that the weakening had shunted us back into our own version of the Tract—we would know if we emerged into the nexus and I saw advertisements for Sorkan-Shirarental ponies. Muhunnad assured us, however, that such an outcome was very unlikely. Once we were elsewhere, we would only get home again by throwing the dice repeatedly, until our own special number came up.

For all that, when we did emerge into the Gansu nexus, my first thought was that Muhunnad had been wrong about those odds. Somehow or other, we had beaten them and dropped back into our own space. As the door opened to admit us back into the spherical volume of the hollowed-out moon, I had the same impression of teeming wealth; of a city packed tight around the central core, of luminous messages rising up the ninety-nine golden spokes, of the airspace thick with jewel-bright ships and gaudily patterned, mothlike shuttles, the glittering commerce of ten thousand worlds.

And yet, it only took a second glimpse to see that I was wrong.

This was no part of the Mongol Expansion. The ships were wrong; the shuttles were wrong: cruder and clumsier even than our most antiquated ships. The city down below had a haphazard, ramshackle look to it, its structures ugly and square-faced. The message on the spokes were spelled out in the angular letters of that pre-Mongol language, Latin. I could not tell if they were advertisements, news reports, or political slogans.

We slowed down, coming to a hovering standstill relative to the golden spokes and the building-choked core. The Mandate of Heavenhad only just cleared the portal entrance, with the door still open behind it. I presumed that some automatic system would not permit it to close with a ship still so close.

Qilian was a model of patience, by his standards. He gave Muhunnad several minutes to digest the information arriving from the River Volga’smany sensors.

“Well, pilot?” he asked, when that interval had elapsed. “Do you recognize this place?”

“Yes,” Muhunnad said. “I do. And we must leave, now.”

“Why so nervous? I’ve seen those ships. They look even more pathetic and fragile than ours must have seemed to you.”

“They are. But there is no such thing as a harmless interstellar culture. These people have only been in space for a couple of hundred years, barely a hundred and fifty since they stumbled on the Infrastructure, but they still have weapons that could hurt us. Worse, they are aggressors.”

“Who are they?” I whispered.

“The culture I mentioned to you back on the Qing Shui moon: the ones who are now in their twenty-third century. You would call them Christians, I suppose.”

“Nestorians?” Qilian asked, narrowing his eyes.

“Another offshoot of the same cult, if one wishes to split hairs. Not that many of them are believers now.

There are even some Islamists among them, although there is little about the Shining Caliphate that they would find familiar.”

“Perhaps we can do business with them,” Qilian mused.

“I doubt it. They would find you repulsive, and they would loathe you for what you did to them in your history.”

It was as if Muhunnad had not spoken at all. When he alluded to such matters, Qilian paid no heed to his words. “Take us closer to the core,” he said. “We didn’t weld all this armor onto the Volgafor nothing.”

When Muhunnad did not show readiness to comply with Qilian’s order, a disciplinary measure was administered through the input sockets of the harness. Muhunnad stiffened against his restraints, then—evidently deciding that death at the hands of the Christians was no worse than torture by Mongols—he began to move us away from the portal.

“I am sorry,” I whispered. “I know you only want to do what’s best for us.”

“I am sorry as well,” he said, when Qilian was out of earshot. “Sorry for being so weak, that I do what he asks of me, even when I know it is wrong.”

“No one blames you,” I replied.

We had crossed five hundred liwithout drawing any visible attention from the other vessels, which continued to move through the sphere as if going about their normal business. We even observed several ships emerge and depart through portals. But then, quite suddenly, it was as if a great shoal of fish had become aware of the presence of two sleek, hungry predators nosing through their midst. All around us, from one minute to the next, the various craft began to dart away, abandoning whatever course or errand they had been on before. Some of them ducked into portals or lost themselves in the thicket of spokes, while others fled for the cover of the core.

I tensed. Whatever response we were due was surely on its way by now.

As it happened, we did not have long to wait. In contrast to the civilian vessels attempting to get as far away from us as possible, three ships were converging on us. We studied them on high magnification, on one of the display screens in the River Volga’sbridge. They were shaped like arrowheads, painted with black and white stripes and the odd markings of the Christians. Their blade-sharp leading edges bristled with what could have been sensors, refueling probes, or weapons.

From his couch, Muhunnad said: “We are being signaled. I believe I can interpret the transmission.

Would you like to see it?”

“Put it on,” Qilian said.

We were looking at a woman who was wearing a heavy black uniform, shiny like waxed leather. She was pinned back into a heavily padded seat: I did not doubt that I was looking at the pilot of one of the ships racing to intercept us. Much of her face was hidden under a globular black helmet, with a red-tinted visor lowered down over her eyes. On the crown of the helmet was a curious symbol: a little drawing of Earth, overlaid with lines of latitude and longitude, and flanked by what I took to be a pair of laurel leaves. She was speaking into a microphone, her words coming over the bridge speaker. I wished I had studied more dead languages at the academy. Then again, given my lack of success with Arabic, perhaps I would still not have understood her Latin either.

What was clear was that the woman was not happy; that her tone was becoming ever more strident. At last, she muttered something that, had she been speaking Mongol, might have been some dismissive invitation to go to hell.

“Perhaps we should turn after all,” Qilian said, or started to say. But by then, the three ships had loosed their missiles: four apiece, grouping into two packs of six, one for the Mandate of Heavenand one for us.

Muhunnad needed no further encouragement. He whipped us around with all haste, pushing the River Volga’sthrust to its maximum. Again, the stress of it was enough to set the ship protesting. At the same time, Muhunnad brought our own weapons into use, running those guns out on their magnetic cradles and firing at the missiles as they closed distance between us and the Christians. Given the range and efficacy of our beam weapons, it would not have troubled him to eliminate the three ships. In concentrating on the missiles, not the pursuers, he was doing all that he could not to inflame matters further. As an envoy of Greater Mongolia, I suppose I should have been grateful. But I was already beginning to doubt that the fate of my empire was going to be of much concern for me.

Because we had turned around, the Mandate of Heavenwas the first to reach the portal. By then, the door had begun to close, but it only took a brief assault from the Mandate’schaser guns to snip a hole in it. Muhunnad had destroyed nine of the twelve missiles by this point, but the remaining three were proving more elusive; in witnessing the deaths of their brethren, they appeared to have grown more cunning. By the time the Mandatecleared the portal, the three had arrived within fifteen liof the River Volga.By switching to a different fire pattern, Muhunnad succeeded in destroying two of them, but the last one managed to evade him until it had come within five li.At that point, bound by the outcome of some ruthless logical decision-making algorithm, the missile opted to detonate rather than risk coming any closer. It must have hoped to inflict fatal damage on us, even at five li.

It very nearly did. I recalled what our pilot had said about there being no such thing as a harmless interstellar culture. The blast inflicted severe damage to our rear shielding and drive assembly, knocking off another two stabilization vanes.

And then we were through, back into the Infrastructure. We had survived our first encounter with another galactic empire.

More were to follow.

* * *

In my mind’s eye, I have an image of a solitary tree, bare of leaves, so that its branching structure is laid open for inspection. The point where each branch diverges from a larger limb is a moment of historical crisis, where the course of world events is poised to swerve onto one of two tracks.

Before his death, our founder spoke of having brought a single law to the six directions of space, words that have a deep resonance for all Mongols, as if it was our birthright to command the fundamental fabric of reality itself. They were prescient words, too, for the bringing of unity to Greater Mongolia, let alone the first faltering steps toward the Expansion, had barely begun. Fifty-four years after his burial, our fleet conquered the islands of Japan, extending the empire as far east as it was possible to go. But the day after our fleet landed, a terrible storm battered the harbors of those islands, one that would surely have repelled or destroyed our invasion fleet had it still been at sea. At the time, it was considered a great good fortune; a sure sign that Heaven had ordained this invasion by delaying that storm. Yet who is to say what would have become of Japan, had it not fallen under Mongol authority? By the same token, who is to say what would have become of our empire if its confident expansion had been checked by the loss of that fleet? We might not have taken Vienna and the cities of western Europe, and then the great continents on the other side of the ocean.

I thought of Muhunnad’s Shining Caliphate. The common view is that the Islamists were monotheistic savages until swept under the tide of the Mongol enlightenment. But I am mindful that history is always written by the victors. We regard our founder as a man of wisdom and learning first and a warrior second, a man who was respectful of literacy, was curious about the sciences, and possessed a keen thirst for philosophical inquiry. Might the conquered have viewed him differently, I wonder? Especially if our empire fell, and we were not there to gilden his name?

No matter; all that need concern us is that solitary tree, that multiplicity of branches, reaching ever upward. After the moment of crisis, the point of bifurcation, there should be no further contact between one branch and the next. In one branch, the Mongols take the world. In another, the Islamists. In another, some obscure sect of Christians. In another, much older branch, none of these empires ever become a gleam in history’s eye. In an even older one, the lemurs are masters of Creation, not some hairless monkey.

But what matters is that all these empires eventually find the Infrastructure. In some way that I cannot quite grasp, and perhaps will never truly understand, the khorkoimachinery exists across all those branches. Not simply as multiple copies of the same Infrastructure, but as a single entity that in some way permits the reunification of those branches: as if, having grown apart, they begin to knot back together again.

I do not think this is intentional. If it were, the leaky nature of the Infrastructure would have been apparent to us five hundred years ago. It seems more likely to me that it is growing leaky; that some kind of insulation is beginning to wear away, an insulation that prevents history short-circuiting itself, as it were.

But perhaps I am wrong to second-guess the motives of aliens whose minds we will never know.

Perhaps all of this is unfolding according to some inscrutable and deliriously protracted scheme of our unwitting wormlike benefactors. I do not think we will ever know.

* * *

I shall spare you the details of all the encounters that followed, as we slipped from one point of weakness to another, always hoping that the next transition would be the one that brought us back to Mongol space, or at least into an empire we could do business with. By the time of our eighth or ninth transition, I think, Qilian would have been quite overjoyed to find himself a guest of the Shining Caliphate. I think he would have even settled for a humbling return to the Christians: by the time we had scuttled away from empires as strange, or as brazenly hostile, as those of the Fish People or the Thin Men, the Christians had come to seem like very approachable fellows indeed.

But it was not to be. And when we dared to imagine that we had seen the worst that the branching tree of historical possibilities could offer, that we had done well not to stray into the dominion of the lemurs, that Heaven must yet be ordaining our adventure, we had the glorious misfortune to fall into the realm of the Smiling Ones.

They came hard and fast, and did not trifle with negotiation. Their clawlike green ships moved without thrust, cutting through space as if space itself was a kind of fluid they could swim against. Their beam weapons etched glimmering lines of violet across the void, despite the fact that they were being deployed in hard vacuum. They cut into us like scythes. I knew then that they could have killed us in a flash, but that they preferred to wound, to maim, to toy.

The River Volgatwisted like an animal in agony, and then there was a gap in my thoughts wide enough for a lifetime.

* * *

The first thing that flashed through my mind after I returned to consciousness was frank amazement that we were still alive; that the ship had not burst open like a ripe fruit and spilled us all into vacuum. The second thing was that, given the proximity of the attacking vehicles, our stay of execution was unlikely to be long. I did not need the evidence of readouts to tell me that the

River Volga

had been mortally wounded. The lights were out, artificial gravity had failed, and in place of the normal hiss and chug of her air recirculators, there was an ominous silence, broken only by the occasional creak of some stressed structural member, cooling down after being heated close to boiling point.

“Commander Qilian?” I called, into the echoing darkness.

No immediate answer was forthcoming. But no sooner had I spoken than an emergency system kicked in and supplied dim illumination to the cabin, traced in the wavery lines of fluorescent strips stapled to walls and bulkheads. I could still not hear generators or the other sounds of routine shipboard operation, so I presumed the lights were drawing on stored battery power. Cautiously, I released my restraints and floated free of my chair. I felt vulnerable, but if we were attacked again, it would make no difference whether I was secured or not.

“Yellow Dog,” a voice called, from further up the cabin. It was Qilian, sounding groggy but otherwise sound. “I blacked out. How long was I under?”

“Not long, sir. It can’t have been more than a minute since they hit us.” I started pulling myself toward him, propelling myself with a combination of vigorous air-swimming and the use of the straps and handholds attached to the walls for emergency use. “Are you all right, sir?”

“I think—” Then he grunted, not loudly, but enough to let me know that he was in considerable pain.

“Arm’s broken. Wasn’t quite secure when it happened.”

He was floating with his knees tucked high, inspecting the damage to his right arm. In the scarlet backup lighting, little droplets of blood, pulled spherical by surface tension, were pale, colorless marbles. He had made light of the injury but it was worse than I had been expecting, a compound fracture of the radius bone, with a sharp white piece glaring out from his skin. The bleeding was abating, but the pain must have been excruciating. And yet Qilian caressed the skin around the wound as if it was no more irritating than a mild rash.

I paddled around until I found the medical kit. I offered to help Qilian apply the splint and dressing, but he waved aside my assistance save for when it came time to cut the bandage. The River Volgacontinued to creak and groan around us, like some awesome monster in the throes of a nightmare.

“Have you see the others?”

“Uugan, Jura, and Batbayar must still be at their stations in the midship section.”

“And the pilot?”

I had only glanced at Muhunnad while I searched for the medical kit, but what I had seen had not encouraged me. He had suffered no visible injuries, but it was clear from his extreme immobility, and lack of response as I drifted by him, that all was not well. His eyes were open but apparently unseeing, fixated on a blank piece of wall above the couch.

“I don’t know, sir. It may not be good.”

“If he’s dead, we’re not going to be able to cut back into the Infrastructure.”

I saw no point in reminding Qilian that, with the ship in its present state, Muhunnad’s condition would make no difference. “It could be that he’s just knocked out, or that there’s a fault with his interface harness,” I said, not really believing it myself.

“I don’t know what happened to us just before I blacked out. Did you feel the ship twist around the way I did?”

I nodded. “Muhunnad must have lost attitude control.”

Qilian finished with his dressing, inspecting the arm with a look of quiet satisfaction. “I am going to check on the others. See what you can do with the pilot, Yellow Dog.”

“I’ll do my best, sir.”

He pushed off with his good arm, steering an expert course through the narrow throat of the bridge connecting door. I wondered what he hoped to do if the technical staff were dead, or injured, or otherwise incapable of assisting the damaged ship. I sensed that Qilian preferred not to look death in the eye until it was almost upon him.

Forcing my mind to the matter at hand, I moved to the reclined couch that held Muhunnad. I positioned myself next to him, anchoring in place with a foothold.