Alastair Reynolds - The Six Directions of Space

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.