The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (27 page)

“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 watercolour 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, sickle-like 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 evershifting 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
alds
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 knicknacks. “It’s not much of an existence, truth be told. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have an economy that needs fuelling. We have jobs. We have vacancies for skilled labour. 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, cosied 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 honoured 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, 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 that 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. “Just what is it about the phantoms that interests you so much, Yellow Dog?”

“Why should you worry about my interest in a phenomenon that doesn’t exist?” I countered.

“Do you believe that, after what you saw on the
Burkhan Khaldun
?”

“I can only report what I saw. It would not be for me to make inferences.”

“But still.”

“Why are we discussing this, Commander Qilian?”

“Because I’m intrigued. Our perception was that NHK probably knew a lot more about the phenomenon than we did. Your arrival suggests otherwise. They sent you on an intelligence gathering mission, and the thrust of your enquiry indicates that you are at least as much in the dark as we are, if not more so.”

“I can’t speak for my superiors.”

“No, you can’t. But it seems unlikely that they’d have risked sending a valued asset into a troublespot like Kuchlug without very good reason. Which, needless to say, is deeply alarming. We thought the core had the matter under control. Clearly, they don’t. Which only makes the whole issue of the phantoms even more vexed and troubling.”

“What do you know?”

He laughed. “You think I’m going to tell you, just like that?”

“You’ve as much as admitted that this goes beyond any petty political differences that might exist between NHK and Kuchlug. Let me report back to my superiors. I’ll obtain their guarantee that there’ll be a twoway traffic in intelligence.” I nodded firmly. “Yes, we misjudged this one. I should never have come under deep cover. But we were anxious not to undermine your confidence in us by revealing the depth of our ignorance on the phenomenon. I assure you that in the future everything will be above board and transparent. We can set up a bilateral investigative team, pooling the best experts from here and back home.”

“That easy, eh? We just shake hands and put it all behind us? The deception on your part, the torture on ours?”

I shrugged. “You had your methods. I had mine.”

Qilian smiled slightly. “There’s something you need to know. Two days ago – not long after we dug that thing out of you – we did in fact send a communiqué to NHK. We informed them that one of their agents was now in our safekeeping, that she was being more than helpful in answering our questions, and that we would be happy to return her at the earliest opportunity.”

“Go on.”

“They told us that there was no such agent. They denied knowledge of either Ariunaa Bocheng or an operative named Yellow Dog. They made no demands for you to be returned, although they did say that if you were handed over, you’d be of ‘interest’ to them. Do you know what this means?’ When I refrained from answering – though I knew precisely what it meant – Qilian continued. “You’ve been disavowed, Yellow Dog. Left out in the cold, like a starving mongrel.”

His men came for me again, several days later. I was taken to a pressurized boarding platform, a spindly structure cantilevered out from the side of the government building. A cable car was waiting, a dull-grey, bulbousended cylinder swaying gently against its restraints. The guards pushed me aboard, then slammed the airtight door, before turning a massive wheel to lock it shut. Qilian was already aboard the car, sitting in a dimpled leather chair with one leg crossed over the other. He wore huge fur-lined boots equipped with vicious spurs.

“A little trip, I thought,” he said, by way of welcome, indicating the vacant seat opposite his.

The cable car lurched into motion. After reaching the limit of the boarding area, it passed through a long glass airlock and then dropped sickeningly, plunging down so far that it descended under the lowest level of buildings and factory structures perched on the platform. One of the huge, skeletal legs was rising towards us, the foot raised as if it intended to stomp down on the fragile little cable car. Yet just when it seemed we were doomed, the car began to climb again, creaking and swaying. Qilian was looking at something through a pair of tiny binoculars, some piece of equipment – a probe or drillhead, I presumed – being winched up from the surface, into the underside of the platform.

“Is there a point to this journey?” I asked.

He lowered the binoculars and returned them to a leather case on his belt. “Very much so. What I will show you constitutes a kind of test. I would advise you to be on your guard against the obvious.”

The cable car slid across the fractured landscape of the moon, traversing dizzyingly wide crevasses, dodging geysers, skimming past tilted rockfaces which seemed on the verge of toppling over at any moment. We rose and descended several times, on each occasion passing over one of the walking platforms. Now and then, there was an interruption while we were switched to a different line, before once more plunging down towards the surface. After more than half an hour of this – just when my stomach was beginning to settle into the rhythm – we came to a definite halt on what was in all respects just another boarding platform, attended by a familiar retinue of guards and technical functionaries. Qilian and I disembarked, with his spurs clicking against the cleated metal flooring. With a company of guards for escort, we walked into the interior of the platform’s largest building. The entire place had an oily ambience, rumbling with the vibration of distant drilling processes.

“It’s a cover,” Qilian said, as if he had read my thoughts. “We keep the machines turning, but this is the one platform that doesn’t have a useful production yield. It’s a study facility instead.”

“For studying what?”

“Whatever we manage to recover, basically.”

Deep in the bowels of the platform, at a level which must have meant they were only just above the underside, was a huge holding tank which – so Qilian informed me – was designed to contain the unrefined liquid slurry that would ordinarily have been pumped up from under the ice. In this platform, the tank had been drained and equipped with power and lighting. The entire space had been partitioned into about a dozen ceiling-less rooms, each of which appeared to contain a collection of garbage, arranged within the cells of a printed grid laid out on the floor. Some of the cells held sizable clusters of junk, others were empty. Benches arranged around the edges of the cells were piled with bits of twinkly rubbish, along with an impressive array of analysis tools and recording devices.

It looked as if it should have been a literal hive of activity, but the entire place was deserted.

“You want to tell me what I’m looking at here?”

Qilian indicated a ladder. “Go down and take a look for yourself. Examine anything that takes your fancy. Use any tools you feel like. Look in the notebooks and data files. Rummage. Break stuff. You won’t be punished if you do.”

“This is phantom technology, isn’t it? You’ve recovered pieces of alien ships.” I said this in a kind of awed whisper, as if I hardly dared believe it myself.

“Draw whatever conclusion you see fit. I shall be intensely interested in what you have to say.”

I started down the ladder. I had known from the moment I saw the relics that I would be unable to resist. “How long have I got? Before I’m judged to have failed this test, or whatever it is.”

“Take your time,” he said, smiling. “But don’t take
too
much.”

There seemed little point agonizing over which room to start with, assuming I had the time to examine more than one. The one I chose had the usual arrangement of grid, junk, and equipment benches. Lights burned from a rack suspended overhead. I stepped into the grid, striding over blank squares until she arrived at a promising little clump of mangled parts, some of them glittery, some of them charred to near-blackness. Gingerly, I picked up one of the bits. It was a curving section of metallic foil, ragged along one edge, much lighter and stiffer than I felt it had any right to be. I tested the edge against a finger and drew a bead of blood. No markings or detail of any kind. I placed it back down on the grid and examined another item. Heavier this time, solid in my hands, like a piece of good carved wood. Flowing, scroll-like green patterning on one convex surface: a suggestion of script, or a fragmented part of some script, in a language I did not recognise. I returned it to the grid and picked up a jagged, bifurcated thing like a very unwieldy sword or spearhead, formed in some metallic red material that appeared mirror-smooth and untarnished. In my hands, the thing had an unsettling buzzing quality, as if there was still something going on inside it. I picked up another object: a dented blue-green box, embossed with dense geometric patterns, cross-woven into one another in a manner that made my head hurt. The lid of the box opened to reveal six egglike white ovals, packed into spongey black material. There were six distinct spiral symbols painted onto the ovals, in another language that I did not recognize.