Alastair Reynolds - The Six Directions of Space

“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 aids 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 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

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 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.