Alastair Reynolds: The Six Directions of Space

“No,” I said, trying to break free of the straps that bound me to the chair.

“Before you arrived,” Qilian said, “certain surgical preparations were made. A number of ribs have already been removed. They can be put back, of course, but their absence now means that there is an unobstructed path through to your pony’s heart.”

With his right hand, he reached into the wound. He frowned, concentrating on the task. He delved in slowly, cautiously. Goyo responded by thrashing against his restraints, but it was to no more avail than my own efforts. In a short while, Qilian’s entire fist was hidden. He pushed deeper, encountering resistance. Now the fist and fully half of his forearm were gone. He adjusted his posture, leaning in so that his chest was braced against Goyo’s shoulder. He pushed deeper, until only the top extremity of the glove remained visible.

“I am touching his beating heart now,” Qilian said, looking directly at me. “He’s a strong one, no doubt about that. A fine pony, from good Mongol stock. But I am stronger, at least when I have my hand on his heart. You don’t think I can stop it beating? I assure you I can. Would you like to see?” The expression on his face altered to one of concentrated effort, little veins bulging at the side of his temple. Goyo thrashed with renewed energy. “Yes, he feels it now. He doesn’t know what’s happening, but a billion years of dumb evolution tells him something’s not right. I don’t doubt that the pain is excruciating, at least in animal terms. Would you like me to stop?”

The words spilled out, feeling like a genuine confession. “I am Yellow Dog. I am a government operative, one of the Thirteen.”

“Yes, we thought you were Yellow Dog. We have the non-official cover list for all of the Thirteen, and we know that Ariunaa Bocheng is a name you’ve used before, when posing as a journalist.” He broke off, took a deep breath, and seemed to redouble his efforts. “But it’s good to get it from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.”

“Stop now.”

“Too late. I’ve already started.”

“You said you’d stop,” I replied, screaming out the words. “You promised you’d stop!”

“I said nothing of the sort. I said the ribs could be put back. That remains the case.”

In an instant, Goyo stopped thrashing. His eye was still open, but all of a sudden there was nothing behind it.

Several weeks later—I could not say precisely how many—Qilian sat opposite me with his big hairy hands clasped in silent contemplation. The documents on his desk were kept in place by grisly paperweights: little plinth-mounted bones and bottled, shrunken things in vinegary solution. There were swords and ceremonial knives on the wall, framing a familiar reproduction watercolor showing the landing of the invasion fleet on Japanese soil.

“You were good,” he said eventually. “I’ll give you that. My men genuinely thought they’d hit bottom when they got you to confess to being the journalist. It was a surprise to all concerned when that identity turned out to be a cover.”

“I’m glad I provided you with some amusement,” I said.

“If it hadn’t been for that implant, we might never have known. Your people really should give some thought into making those things less detectable.”

“My people?” I asked. “The last time I checked, we were all working for the same government.”

“I don’t doubt that’s how it feels in New High Karakorum. Out here, it’s a different story. In case you hadn’t realized, this is a special administrative volume. It’s part of the empire, but only in a very tenuous, politically ambiguous sense. They want what we can give them—raw materials, cheaply synthesized chemicals, mass-produced low-bulk consumer goods—but they don’t want to think too hard about what we have to do to keep that river of commerce flowing. Laws have to be bent here, because otherwise there’d be no here. Look out the window, Yellow Dog.”

Visible through the partially shuttered window of his office, a good four or five li below, was a brutal, wintery landscape of stained ice, reaching all the way to the horizon. The sky was a rose pink, shading to midnight blue at the top of the window. Cutting through it along a diagonal was the twinkling, sicklelike curve of a planetary ring system. Canyon-deep fissures cracked the surface, leaking feathery quills of yellow-white steam into the thin, poisonous atmosphere of that windswept sky. Here and there, an elbow of splintered rock broke the surface. There were no fixed communities on the moon. Instead, immense spiderlike platforms, mounted on six or eight intricate jointed legs, picked their way across the ever-shifting terrain in awesome slow motion. The platforms varied in size, but at the very least each supported a cluster of squat civic buildings, factories, refineries, and spacecraft handling facilities. Some of the platforms had deployed drilling rigs or cables into the fissures, sucking chemical nourishment from under the icy crust. A number were connected together by long, dangling wires, along which I made out the tiny, suspended forms of cable cars, moving from platform to platform.

“It’s very pretty,” I said.

“It’s a hellhole, frankly. Only three planets in the entire volume are even remotely amenable to terraforming, and not one of those three is on track for completion inside five hundred years. We’ll be lucky if any of them are done before the Founder’s two thousandth anniversary, let alone the thousandth.

Most of the eighty million people under my stewardship live in domes and tunnels, with only a few aids of soil or glass between them and a horrible, choking death.” He unclasped his hands in order to run a finger across one of his desktop knickknacks. “It’s not much of an existence, truth be told. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have an economy that needs fueling. We have jobs. We have vacancies for skilled labor.

Machines do our drilling, but the machines need to be fixed and programmed by people, down at the cutting face. We pay well, for those prepared to work for us.”

“And you come down hard on those who displease you.”

“Local solutions to local problems, that’s our mantra. You wouldn’t understand, cozied up in the middle of the empire. You pushed the dissidents and troublemakers out to the edge and left us to worry about them.” He tapped a finger against his desk. “Nestorian Christians, Buddhists, Islamists. It’s a thousand years since we crushed them, and they still haven’t got over it. Barely a week goes by without some regressive, fundamentalist element stirring up trouble, whether it’s sabotage of one of our industrial facilities or a terrorist attack against the citizenship. And yet you sit there in New High Karakorum and shake your heads in disgust when we have the temerity to implement even the mildest security measures.”

“I wouldn’t call mass arrests, show trials, and public executions ‘mild,’” I said tartly.

“Then try living here.”

“I get the impression that’s not really an option. Unless you mean living in prison, for the rest of my life, or until NHK sends an extraction team.”

Qilian made a pained expression. “Let’s be clear. You aren’t my enemy. Quite the contrary. You are now an honored guest of the Kuchlug special administrative volume. I regret what happened earlier, but if you’d admitted your true identity, none of that would have been necessary.” He folded his arms behind his neck and leaned back in his chair with a creak of leather. “We’ve got off on the wrong footing here, you and I. But how are we supposed to feel when the empire sends undercover agents snooping into our territory? And not only that, but agents who persist in asking such puzzling questions?” He looked at me with sudden, sharp intensity, as if my entire future hung on my response to what he was about to say.