The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Sixth Annual

by Gardner Dozois

  ‘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 Quilian’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 towards 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 alds of 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 alds,’ 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 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 which 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 traveller. 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 wellbeing. 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 I.’

  ‘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 occupies much the same volume as your own empire. It even has the same homeworld. 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 realisation 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 could grasp, 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 li in length, her frontal stabilisation spines suggesting the curving whiskers of a catfish. She had been a merchant vehicle once; latterly, 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 ald. The navigation and steering mechanisms of both ships had been upgraded to permit high-agility manoeuvres, 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 Volga during 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 Heaven reported some minor buffeting, but this was soon negated following a refinement of the control linkage between the two ships. Then we had nothing but 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 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, half way 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 Heaven immediately 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 break-up; 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 Volga had been equipped to withstand losses that would have cripped 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 Heaven suffered 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, travelling 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’s nervous 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 they call 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 mission
s, 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 micro-signatures in the tunnel physics that indicate that they have returned home.’

  ‘Signatures which 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 non-negligible possibity 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-Shira rental 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 Heaven had 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.