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of more than one intruding culture, but you didn't need me to tell you that."
"No," he acknowledged.
"So there had to be something else. I didn't know what. But when I went back into the second room,
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
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