The Six Directions of Space

“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.

“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 inquiry 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 trouble spot 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 two-way 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 aboveboard 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 communique 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—