The Six Directions of Space

something flashed through my mind. I knew I had seen something in there before, even if it had been in a completely different context.”

I could not tell if he was pleased or disappointed. “Continue.”

“The green markings on some of the relics. They meant nothing to me at first, but I suppose my subconscious must have picked up on something even then. They were fragments of something larger, which I’d seen before.”

“Which was?”

“Arabic writing,” I told him.

“Many people would be surprised to hear there was such a thing.”

“If they knew their history, they’d know that the Arabs had a written language. An elegant one, too. It’s just that most people outside of academic departments won’t have ever seen it, any more than they know what Japanese or the Roman alphabet looks like.”

“But you, on the other hand—”

“In my work for the khanate, I was obliged to compile dossiers on dissident elements within the empire.

Some of the Islamist factions still use a form of Arabic for internal communications.”

He sniffed through his nostrils, looking at me with his penetrating blue eyes. The cable car creaked and swayed. “It took my analysis experts eight months to recognize that that lettering had a human origin. The test is over; you have passed. But would you care to speculate on the meaning of your observation? Why are we finding Arabic on phantom relics?”

“I don’t know.”

“But indulge me.”

“It can only mean that there’s an Islamist faction out there that we don’t know about. A group with independent space-faring capability, the means to use the Infrastructure despite all the access restrictions already in place.”

“And the other relics? Where do they fit in?”

“I don’t know.”

“If I told you that, in addition to items we consider to be of unambiguously alien origin, we’d also found scraps of other vanished or obscure languages—or at least, scripts and symbols connected to them—what would you say?”

I admitted that I had no explanation for how such a thing might be possible. It was one thing to allow the existence of a secret enclave of technologically advanced Islamists, however improbable that might have been. It was quite another to posit the existence of many such enclaves, each preserving some vanished or atrophied branch of human culture.

“Here is what’s going to happen.” He spoke the words as if there could be no possibility of dissent on my behalf. “As has already been made clear, your old life is over, utterly and finally. But there is still much that you can do to serve the will of Heaven. The khanate has only now taken a real interest in the phantoms, whereas we have been alert to the phenomenon for many years. If you care about the security of the empire, you will see the sense in working with Kuchlug.”

“You mean, join the team analyzing those relics?”

“As a matter of fact, I want you to lead it.” He smiled; I could not tell if the idea had just occurred to him, or whether it had always been at the back of his mind. “You’ve already demonstrated the acuteness of your observations. I have no doubt that you will continue to uncover truths that the existing team has overlooked.”

“I can’t just… take over, like that.”

He looked taken aback. “Why ever not?”

“A few days ago, I was your prisoner,” I said. “Not long before that, you were torturing me. They’ve no reason to suddenly start trusting me, just on your say-so.”

“You’re wrong about that,” he said, fingering one of the knives strapped across his chest. “They’ll trust who I tell them to trust, absolutely and unquestioningly.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because that’s how we do things around here.”

* * *

So it was. I joined Qilian’s investigative team, immersing myself in the treasure trove of data and relics his people had pieced together in my absence. There was, understandably, a degree of reluctance to accept my authority. But Qilian dealt with that in the expected manner, and slowly, those around me came to a pragmatic understanding that it was either work with me or suffer the consequences.

Relics and fragments continued to fall into our hands. Sometimes the ships that intruded into the Infrastructure were damaged, as if the passage into our territory had been a violent one. Often, the subsequent encounter with one of our ships was enough to shake them to pieces, or at the very least dislodge major components. The majority of these shards vanished without a trace into the implacable machinery of the Infrastructure. Even if the khorkoi apparatus was beginning to fail, it was still more than capable of attending to the garbage left behind by its users. But occasionally, pieces lingered in the system (as if the walls had indigestion?), waiting to be swept up by Qilian’s ships, and eventually brought home to this moon.

As often as not, though, it was a trivial matter to classify the consignments, requiring only a glance at their contents. The work became so routine, in fact—and the quantity of consignments so high—that eventually I had no choice but to take a step back from hands-on analysis. I assembled six teams and let them get on with it, requiring that they report back to me only when they had something of note: a new empire, or something odd from one of those we already knew about.

That was when the golden egg fell into our hands. It was in the seventh month of my service under Qilian, and I immediately knew that it originated from a culture not yet known to us. Perhaps it was a ship, or part of one. The outer hull was almost entirely covered in a quilt of golden platelets, overlapping in the manner of fish scales. The only parts not covered by the platelets were the dark apertures of sensors and thruster ports, and a small, eye-shaped area on one side of the teardrop that we quickly identified as a door.

Fearing that it might damage the other relics if it exploded under our examinations, I ordered that the analysis of the egg take place in a different part of the mining structure. Soon, though, my concern shifted to the welfare of the egg’s occupants. We knew that there were beings inside it, even if we could not be sure if they were human. Scans had illuminated ghostly structures inside the hull: the intestinal complexity of propulsion subsystems, fuel lines, and tanks packed ingeniously tight, the fatty tissue of insulating layers, the bony divisions of armored partitions, the cartilaginous detailing of furniture and life-support equipment. There were even ranks of couches, with eight crew still reclining in them. Dead or in suspended animation, it was impossible to tell. All we could see was their bones, a suggestion of humanoid skeletons, and there was no movement of those bones to suggest respiration.

We got the door open easily enough. It was somewhat like breaking into a safe, but once we had worked out the underlying mechanism—and the curiously alien logic that underpinned its design—it presented no insurmountable difficulties. Gratifyingly, there was only a mild gust of equalizing pressure when the door hinged wide, and none of the sensors arrayed around the egg detected any harmful gases.

As far as we could tell, it was filled with an oxygen-nitrogen mix only slightly different from that aboard our own ships.

“What now?” Qilian asked, fingering the patch of hair beneath his lip.

“We’ll send machines aboard now,” I replied. “Just to be safe, in case there are any booby traps inside.”

He placed a heavy, thick-fingered hand on my shoulder. “What say we skip the machines and just take a look inside ourselves?” His tone was playful. “Not afraid, are we, Yellow Dog?”

“Of course not,” I answered.

“There’s no need to be. I’ll go in first, just in case there are surprises.”

We walked across the floor, through the cordon of sensors, to the base of the attenuated metal staircase that led to the open door. The robots scuttled out of the way. My staff exchanged concerned glances, aware that we were deviating from a protocol we had spent weeks thrashing out to the last detail. I waved down their qualms.

Inside, as we already knew from the scans, the egg was compartmented into several small chambers, with