Qilian was a model of patience, by his standards. He gave Muhunnad several minutes to digest the information arriving from the River Volga’s many sensors.
‘Well, pilot?’ he asked, when that interval had elapsed. ‘Do you recognise this place?’
‘Yes,’ Muhunnad said. ‘I do. And we must leave, now.’
‘Why so nervous? I’ve seen those ships. They look even more pathetic and fragile than ours must have seemed to you.’
‘They are. But there is no such thing as a harmless interstellar culture. These people have only been in space for a couple of hundred years, barely a hundred and fifty since they stumbled on the Infrastructure, but they still have weapons that could hurt us. Worse, they are aggressors.’
‘Who are they?’ I whispered.
‘The culture I mentioned to you back on the Qing Shui moon: the ones who are now in their twenty third century. You would call them Christians, I suppose.’
‘Nestorians?’ Qilian asked, narrowing his eyes.
‘Another off-shoot of the same cult, if one wishes to split hairs. Not that many of them are believers now. There are even some Islamists among them, although there is little about the Shining Caliphate that they would find familiar.’
‘Perhaps we can do business with them,’ Qilian mused.
‘I doubt it. They would find you repulsive, and they would loathe you for what you did to them in your history.’
It was as if Muhunnad had not spoken at all. When he alluded to such matters, Qilian paid no heed to his words. ‘Take us closer to the core,’ he said. ‘We didn’t weld all this armour onto the Volga for nothing.’
When Muhunnad did not show readiness to comply with Qilian’s order, a disciplinary measure was administered through the input sockets of the harness. Muhunnad stiffened against his restraints, then—evidently deciding that death at the hands of the Christians was no worse than torture by Mongols—he began to move us away from the portal.
‘I am sorry,’ I whispered. ‘I know you only want to do what’s best for us.’
‘I am sorry as well,’ he said, when Qilian was out of earshot. ‘Sorry for being so weak, that I do what he asks of me, even when I know it is wrong.’
‘No one blames you,’ I replied.
We had crossed five hundred li without drawing any visible attention from the other vessels, which continued to move through the sphere as if going about their normal business. We even observed several ships emerge and depart through portals. But then, quite suddenly, it was as if a great shoal of fish had become aware of the presence of two sleek, hungry predators nosing through their midst. All around us, from one minute to the next, the various craft began to dart away, abandoning whatever course or errand they had been on before. Some of them ducked into portals, or lost themselves in the thicket of spokes, while others fled for the cover of the core.
I tensed. Whatever response we were due was surely on its way by now.
As it happened, we did not have long to wait. In contrast to the civilian vessels attempting to get as far away from us as possible, three ships were converging on us. We studied them on high magnification, on one of the display screens in the River Volga’s bridge. They were shaped like arrowheads, painted with black and white stripes and the odd markings of the Christians. Their blade-sharp leading edges bristled with what could have been sensors, refuelling probes, or weapons.
From his couch, Muhunnad said: ‘We are being signalled. I believe I can interpret the transmission. Would you like to see it?’
‘Put it on,’ Qilian said.
We were looking at a woman, wearing a heavy black uniform, shiny like waxed leather. She was pinned back into a heavily padded seat: I did not doubt that I was looking at the pilot of one of the ships racing to intercept us. Much of her face was hidden under a globular black helmet, with a red-tinted visor lowered down over her eyes. On the crown of the helmet was a curious symbol: a little drawing of the Earth, overlaid with lines of latitude and longitude, and flanked by what I took to be a pair of laurel leaves. She was speaking into a microphone, her words coming over the bridge speaker. I wished I had studied more dead languages at the academy. Then again, given my lack of success with Arabic, perhaps I would still not have understood her Latin either.
What was clear was that the woman was not happy; that her tone was becoming ever more strident. At last, she muttered something that, had she been speaking Mongol, might have been some dismissive invitation to go to hell.
‘Perhaps we should turn after all,’ Qilian said, or started to say. But by then, the three ships had loosed their missiles: four apiece, grouping into two packs of six, one for the Mandate of Heaven and one for us.
Muhunnad needed no further encouragement. He whipped us around with all haste, pushing the River Volga’s thrust to its maximum. Again, the stress of it was enough to set the ship protesting. At the same time, Muhunnad brought our own weapons into use, running those guns out on their magnetic cradles and firing at the missiles as they closed distance between us and the Christians. Given the range and efficacy of our beam weapons, it would not have troubled him to eliminate the three ships. In concentrating on the missiles, not the pursuers, he was doing all that he could not to inflame matters further. As an envoy of Greater Mongolia, I suppose I should have been grateful. But I was already beginning to doubt that the fate of my empire was going to be of much concern for me.
Because we had turned around, the Mandate of Heaven was the first to reach the portal. By then, the door had begun to close, but it only took a brief assault from the Mandate’s chaser guns to snip a hole in it. Muhunnad had destroyed nine of the twelve missiles by this point, but the remaining three were proving more elusive; in witnessing the deaths of their brethren, they appeared to have grown more cunning. By the time the Mandate cleared the portal, the three had arrived within fifteen li of the River Volga. By switching to a different fire-pattern, Muhunnad succeeded in destroying two of them, but the last one managed to evade him until it had come within five li. At that point, bound by the outcome of some ruthless logical decision-making algorithm, the missile opted to detonate rather than risk coming any closer. It must have hoped to inflict fatal damage on us, even at five li.
It very nearly did. I recalled what our pilot had said about there being no such thing as a harmless interstellar culture. The blast inflicted severe damage to our rear shielding and drive assembly, knocking off another two stabilisation vanes.
And then we were through, back into the Infrastructure. We had survived our first encounter with another galactic empire.
More were to follow.
In my mind’s eye, I have an image of a solitary tree, bare of leaves, so that its branching structure is laid open for inspection. The point where each branch diverges from a larger limb is a moment of historical crisis, where the course of world events is poised to swerve onto one of two tracks.
Before his death, our Founder spoke of having brought a single law to the six directions of space, words that have a deep resonance for all Mongols, as if it was our birthright to command the fundamental fabric of reality itself. They were prescient words, too, for the bringing of unity to Greater Mongolia, let alone the first faltering steps towards the Expansion, had barely begun. Fifty four years after his burial, our fleet conquered the islands of Japan, extending the empire as far east as it was possible to go. But the day after our fleet landed, a terrible storm battered the harbours of those islands, one that would surely have repelled or destroyed our invasion fleet had it still been at sea. At the time, it was considered a great good fortune; a sure sign that Heaven had ordained this invasion by delaying that storm. Yet who is to say what would have become of Japan, had it not fallen under Mongol authority? By the same token, who is to say what would have become of our empire, if its confident expansion had been checked by the loss of that fleet? We might not have taken Vienna and the cities of Western Europe, and then the great continents on the other side of the ocean.
/> I thought of Muhunnad’s Shining Caliphate. The common view is that the Islamists were monotheistic savages until swept under the tide of the Mongol enlightenment. But I am mindful that history is always written by the victors. We regard our Founder as a man of wisdom and learning first and a warrior second, a man who was respectful of literacy, curious about the sciences, and who possessed a keen thirst for philosophical enquiry. Might the conquered have viewed him differently, I wonder? Especially if our empire fell, and we were not there to gilden his name?
No matter; all that need concern us is that solitary tree, that multiplicity of branches, reaching ever upward. After the moment of crisis, the point of bifurcation, there should be no further contact between one branch and the next. In one branch, the Mongols take the world. In another, the Islamists. In another, some obscure sect of Christians. In another, much older branch, none of these empires ever become a gleam in history’s eye. In an even older one, the lemurs are masters of creation, not some hairless monkey.
But what matters is that all these empires eventually find the Infrastructure. In some way that I cannot quite grasp, and perhaps will never truly understand, the khorkoi machinery exists across all those branches. Not simply as multiple copies of the same Infrastructure, but as a single entity that in some way permits the reunification of those branches: as if, having grown apart, they begin to knot back together again.
I do not think this is intentional. If it were, the leaky nature of the Infrastructure would have been apparent to us five hundred years ago. It seems more likely to me that it is growing leaky; that some kind of insulation is beginning to wear away. An insulation that prevents history short-circuiting itself, as it were.
But perhaps I am wrong to second-guess the motives of aliens whose minds we will never know. Perhaps all of this is unfolding according to some inscrutable and deleriously protracted scheme of our unwitting wormlike benefactors.
I do not think we will ever know.
______
I shall spare you the details of all the encounters that followed, as we slipped from one point of weakness to another, always hoping that the next transition would be the one that brought us back to Mongol space, or at least into an empire we could do business with. By the time of our eighth or ninth transition, I think, Qilian would have been quite overjoyed to find himself a guest of the Shining Caliphate. I think he would have even settled for a humbling return to the Christians: by the time we had scuttled away from empires as strange, or as brazenly hostile, as those of the Fish People or the Thin Men, the Christians had come to seem like very approachable fellows indeed.
But it was not to be. And when we dared to imagine that we had seen the worst that the branching tree of historical possibilities could offer, that we had done well not to stray into the dominion of the lemurs, that Heaven must yet be ordaining our adventure, we had the glorious misfortune to fall into the realm of the Smiling Ones.
They came hard and fast, and did not trifle with negotiation. Their clawlike green ships moved without thrust, cutting through space as if space itself was a kind of fluid they could swim against. Their beam weapons etched glimmering lines of violet across the void, despite the fact that they were being deployed in hard vacuum. They cut into us like scythes. I knew then that they could have killed us in a flash, but that they preferred to wound, to maim, to toy.
The River Volga twisted like an animal in agony, and then there was a gap in my thoughts wide enough for a lifetime.
The first thing that flashed through my mind after I returned to consciousness was frank amazement that we were still alive; that the ship had not burst open like a ripe fruit and spilled us all into vacuum. The second thing was that, given the proximity of the attacking vehicles, our stay of execution was unlikely to be long. I did not need the evidence of readouts to tell me that the River Volga had been mortally wounded. The lights were out, artificial gravity had failed, and in place of the normal hiss and chug of her air recirculators, there was an ominous silence, broken only by the occasional creak of some stressed structural member, cooling down after being heated close to boiling point.
‘Commander Qilian?’ I called, into the echoing darkness.
No immediate answer was forthcoming. But no sooner had I spoken than an emergency system kicked in and supplied dim illumination to the cabin, traced in the wavery lines of fluorescent strips stapled to walls and bulkheads. I could still not hear generators or the other sounds of routine shipboard operation, so I presumed the lights were drawing on stored battery power. Cautiously, I released my restraints and floated free of my chair. I felt vulnerable, but if we were attacked again, it would make no difference whether I was secured or not.
‘Yellow Dog,’ a voice called, from further up the cabin. It was Qilian, sounding groggy but otherwise sound. ‘I blacked out. How long was I under?’
‘Not long, sir. It can’t have been more than a minute since they hit us.’ I started pulling myself towards him, propelling myself with a combination of vigorous air-swimming and the use of the straps and handholds attached to the walls for emergency use. ‘Are you all right, sir?’
‘I think . . .’ Then he grunted, not loudly, but enough to let me know that he was in considerable pain. ‘Arm’s broken. Wasn’t quite secure when it happened.’
He was floating with his knees tucked high, inspecting the damage to his right arm. In the scarlet backup lighting, little droplets of blood, pulled spherical by surface tension, were pale colourless marbles. He had made light of the injury but it was worse than I had been expecting, a compound fracture of the radius bone, with a sharp white piece glaring out from his skin. The bleeding was abating, but the pain must have been excruciating. And yet Qilian caressed the skin around the wound as if it was no more irritating than a mild rash.
I paddled around until I found the medical kit. I offered to help Qilian apply the splint and dressing, but he waved aside my assistance save for when it came time to cut the bandage. The River Volga continued to creek and groan around us, like some awesome monster in the throes of a nightmare.
‘Have you seen the others?’
‘Uugan, Jura, and Batbayar must still be at their stations in the mid-ship section.’
‘And the pilot?’
I had only glanced at Muhunnad while I searched for the medical kit, but what I had seen had not encouraged me. He had suffered no visible injuries, but it was clear from his extreme immobility, and lack of response as I drifted by him, that all was not well. His eyes were open but apparently unseeing, fixated on a blank piece of wall above the couch.
‘I don’t know, sir. It may not be good.’
‘If he’s dead, we’re not going to be able to cut back into the Infrastructure.’
I saw no point in reminding Qilian that, with the ship in its present state, Muhunnad’s condition would make no difference. ‘It could be that he’s just knocked out, or that there’s a fault with his interface harness,’ I said, not really believing it myself.
‘I don’t know what happened to us just before I blacked out. Did you feel the ship twist around the way I did?’
I nodded. ‘Muhunnad must have lost attitude control.’
Qilian finished with his dressing, inspecting the arm with a look of quiet satisfaction. ‘I am going to check on the others. See what you can do with the pilot, Yellow Dog.’
‘I’ll do my best, sir.’
He pushed off with his good arm, steering an expert course through the narrow throat of the bridge connecting door. I wondered what he hoped to do if the technical staff were dead, or injured, or otherwise incapable of assisting the damaged ship. I sensed that Qilian preferred not to look death in the eye until it was almost upon him.
Forcing my mind to the matter at hand, I moved to the reclined couch that held Muhunnad. I positioned myself next to him, anchoring in place with a foothold.
I examined the harness, checking the various connectors and status readouts, and could find no obvious break or
weakness in the system. That did not mean that there was not an invisible fault, of course. Equally, if a power surge had happened, it might well have fried his nervous system from the inside out with little sign of external injury. We had built safeguards into the design to prevent that kind of thing, but I had never deceived myself that they were foolproof.
‘I’m sorry, Muhunnad,’ I said quietly. ‘You did well to bring us this far. No matter what you might think of me, I wanted you to make it back to your own people.’
Miraculously, his lips moved. He shaped a word with a mere ghost of breath. ‘Ariunaa?’
I took hold of his gloved hand, squeezing it as much as the harness allowed. ‘I’m here. Right by you.’
‘I cannot see anything,’ he answered, speaking very slowly. ‘Before, I could see everything around me, as well as the sensory information reaching me from the ship’s cameras. Now I only have the cameras, and I am not certain that I am seeing anything meaningful through them. Sometimes I get flashes, as if something is working . . . but most of the time, it is like looking through fog.’
‘Are you sure you can’t make some sense of the camera data?’ I asked. ‘We only have to pass through the Infrastructure portal.’
‘That would be like threading the eye of a needle from half way around the world, Ariunaa. Besides, I think we are paralysed. I have tried firing the steering motors, but I have received no confirmation that anything has actually happened. Have you felt the ship move?’
I thought back to all that had happened since the attack. ‘In the last few minutes? Nothing at all.’
‘Then it must be presumed that we are truly adrift and that the control linkages have been severed.’ He paused. ‘I am sorry; I wish the news was better.’
The Year’s Best Science Fiction (St Martin's) 26 Page 25