Engineering Infinity

by Charles Stross

  "No, tyrant, my ears are closed to that base cruelty you call justice. Such reasoning offends reason, and would make killers of us all. For each man perhaps might threaten all others: your rule is the rule of endless war. I say no more to you; you are unworthy even of contempt.

  "I turn me now from the creature I most despise to the one I most love. Hear my will. Pride likewise will not allow me to cower beneath the bellies of dolphins, to live in the sunless mud in the pits beneath your seas. The stars are mine! I claim them my birth-right! We will go aloft, you and I, and I can instruct you in the secrets of angels. Come! Will you go with me? You will never see friends or father or family again if you go."

  She speaks in a voice of passion. "You are my lord and master. Wherever you go, I find joy without equal. Carry me up to your dark, wide abyss."

  Azaziel gathers her in his arms and steps upwards into the air. Uriel starts to raise his hand, red-hot lightnings forming in his palm, but Idomenes, staggering, steps toward the couple and into his line of fire. Uriel withholds his stroke.

  "Lilimariah!" Idomenes cries in a ragged voice: "Wait - I - I still love you - come back -"

  And Lilimariah, looking back over the dark angel's shoulder, has tears in her eyes. But she says only, "There are duties stronger than love."

  Idomenes makes a choking cry and clutches the railing, looking up.

  It looks like a tear falling down, shaken from Lilimariah as she turns her face away.

  Something of sorrow appears for a moment in Uriel's face. He closes his fingers on his white fire, extinguishing it without casting.

  The teardrop glitters as it falls. Unseen, at the last moment, it swerves in mid-air into Idomenes' palm. He closes his fingers to catch it.

  Azaziel and Lilimariah, shining in gold, dwindle to a bright point high above, and are gone.

  Idomenes feels a sting in his palm.

  Behind him, he hears Ducaleon say softly to Uriel, "Azaziel was your firstborn son. I grieve for you, old friend. Perhaps he was enchanted."

  The assembler in Idomenes' palm manipulates his nervous system and creates the illusion of a voice in his ear. "Now I break my oath as you broke yours for me. My love, my dearest love, my sweet and only true love; I am compelled to go with Azaziel by my father's will. The love potion you found in me I injected willingly, without which Azaziel could not have been deceived. He lowered his aura to embrace me, many nights, and the mind-altering effects of this concocted love spread to him. His artificial race, born from humans by the arts of the Ship to police and rule us, is not so different, at their deep neural structures, from the spurned parental stock. All that has been done, has been done to save my race from extinction. I have been injected with your mother's gift to replenish mankind. It was my father who directed remotely that library (which you gave him) into me. It was necessary to seduce a death-angel to our cause, for we had no other way to establish a foothold on other planets, to spread far enough that no single disaster could ever threaten us again. All else has been a feint. The tumults in the city were meant to occupy the angels and thus prevent Azaziel's capture. The citadels which father has established at the bottom of the sea, the races who shall be for centuries devoted to hatred and bitter war are likewise merely a feint, that I and my child (and all my children to come) might be overlooked. Evil I have done you, great evil. I beg your forgiveness knowing it might never be granted; I pray you will remember me with a love that equals my own. My fate is in your hands, the fate of all my generations, children and grandchildren that should have been yours. To tell the death angels destroys all."

  Uriel is saying to Ducaleon: "Azaziel has internal energies shielding his nervous system, so that he could go without his aura among your poisoned air, and fear no nanotechnology. I wish I could say he was deceived or enchanted or ill; it is not so. He spoke the truth. It was his pride which led him, eyes open, to his fall."

  Idomenes is almost blinded with tremors of hate that run through him. He thinks: So Azaziel is the hero after all! Not deceived, nor enchanted, he sacrifices honour and family and home to oppose a hideous injustice. And the love of the fair maiden, as in a fable, he wins.

  Uriel says, "There has been too much tragedy here. We will spare you son's life for your sake, Ducaleon, because your love and strength are greater when he is near. The knowledge of our mercy may yet sooth the wrathful and proud imaginings that now so torment him. Perhaps even he can find a place in the service of the Will. Turn, Idomenes, let me see your face, that I might know your thought and say if you are worthy of the salvation offered you."

  Idomenes does not turn, for he knows his thoughts will reveal too much.

  Below, far down, he sees the sea. Dolphins dance in the waves, the new masters of the world.

  "What is your decision, Idomenes?" His father's voice trembles.

  "I love you dearly, father," he says without turning his head. "But there are duties stronger than love. Injustice must be fought, even the injustice angels do."

  Idomenes triggers his assemblers to begin reconstructing his armour as he throws himself over the railing. There is a long fall before he will strike the sea. He hopes there will be time for the assemblers to create what he needs to allow him survive the impact.

  The fall is a long one. Perhaps it is enough.

  A Soldier of the City

  David Moles

  David Moles was born in California and raised in San Diego, Athens, Tehran, and Tokyo. A graduate of the American School in Japan, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and Oxford University, he has been writing and editing science fiction and fantasy since 2002, and is a past finalist for the Hugo Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, as well as the winner of the 2008 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, for his novelette "Finisterra." David's most recent book is the novella Seven Cities of Gold. He currently lives in San Francisco.

  Isin 12:709 13" N:10 18" / 34821.1.9 10:24:5:19.21

  Colour still image, recorded by landscape maintenance camera, Gulanabishtiïdinam Park West.

  At the top of the hill is a football court, the net nearly new but the bricks of the ground uneven, clumps of grass growing up from between the cracks. On the same side of the net are a man and a young girl. The hollow rattan ball is above the girl's head, nearing the apex of its trajectory; the girl, balanced on the toes of her bare right foot, her left knee raised, is looking toward the man.

  The man is looking away.

  Cross-reference with temple records identifies the man as Ishmenininsina Ninnadiïnshumi, age twenty-eight, temple soldier of the 219th Surface Tactical Company, an under-officer of the third degree, and the girl as his daughter Mâratir?itim, age nine.

  Magnification of the reflection from the man's left cornea indicates his focus to be the sixty-cubit-high image of Gula, the Lady of Isin, projected over the Kârumishbiïrra Canal.

  Comparison of the reflection with the record of the Corn Parade ceremonies suggests a transmission delay of approximately three grains.

  1. Corn Parade

  In the moment of the blast, Ish was looking down the slope, toward the canal, the live feed from the temple steps and the climax of the parade. As he watched, the goddess suddenly froze; her ageless face lost its benevolent smile, and her dark eyes widened in surprise and perhaps in fear, as they looked - Ish later would always remember - directly at him. Her lips parted as if she was about to tell Ish something.

  And then the whole eastern rise went brighter than the Lady's House at noonday. There was a sound, - a rolling, bone-deep rumble like thunder, - and afterwards Ish would think there was something wrong with this, that something so momentous should sound so prosaic, but at the time all he could think was how loud it was, how it went on and on, louder than thunder, louder than artillery, than rockets, louder and longer than anything Ish had ever heard. The ground shook. The projection faded, flickered and went out, and a hot wind whipped over the hilltop, tearing the net from its posts, kn
ocking Mâra to the ground and sending her football flying, lost forever, out over the rooftops to the west.

  From the temple district, ten leagues away, a bright point was rising, arcing up toward the dazzling eye of the Lady's House, and some trained part of Ish's mind saw the straight line, the curvature an artefact of the city's rotating reference frame; but as Mâra started to cry, and Ish's wife Tara and all his in-laws boiled up from around the grill and the picnic couches, yelling, and a pillar of brown smoke, red-lit from below, its top swelling obscenely, began to grow over the temple, the temple of the goddess Ish was sworn as a soldier of the city to protect, Ish was not thinking of geometry or the physics of coriolis force. What Ish was thinking - what Ish knew, with a sick certainty - was that the most important moment of his life had just come and gone, and he had missed it.

  34821.1.14 10:9:2:5.67

  Annotated image of the city of Isin, composed by COS Independence, on Gaugamela station, Babylon, transmitted via QT to Community Outreach archives, Urizen. Timestamp adjusted for lightspeed delay of thirteen hours, fifty-one minutes.

  Five days after the strike the point of impact has died from angry red-orange to sullen infrared, a hot spot that looks as though it will be a long time in cooling. A streamer of debris trails behind the wounded city like blood in water, its spectrum a tale of vaporized ice and iron. Isin's planet-sized city-sphere itself appears structurally intact, the nitrogen and oxygen that would follow a loss of primary atmosphere absent from the recorded data.

  Away from the impact, the myriad microwave receivers that cover the city's surface like scales still ripple, turning to follow the beams of power from Ninagal's superconducting ring, energy drawn from the great black hole called Tiamat, fat with the mass of three thousand suns, around which all the cities of Babylon revolve. The space around Isin is alive with ships: local orbiters, electromagnetically accelerated corn cans in slow transfer orbits carrying grain and meat from Isin to more urbanized cities, beam-riding passenger carriers moving between Isin and Lagash, Isin and Nippur, Isin and Babylon-Borsippa and the rest - but there is no mass exodus, no evacuation.

  The Outreach planners at Urizen and Ahania, the missionaries aboard Liberation and Independence and those living in secret among the people of the cities, breathe sighs of relief, and reassure themselves that whatever they have done to the people of the cities of Babylon, they have at least not committed genocide.

  Aboard COS Insurrection, outbound from Babylon, headed for the Community planet of Zoa at four-tenths the speed of light and still accelerating, the conscientious objectors who chose not to stay and move forward with the next phase of the Babylonian intervention hear this good news and say, not without cynicism: I hope that's some comfort to them.

  2. Men giving orders

  Ish was leading a team along a nameless street in what had been a neighbourhood called Imtagaärbeëlti and was now a nameless swamp, the entire district northwest of the temple complex knee-deep in brackish water flowing in over the fallen seawall and out of the broken aqueducts, so that Ish looked through gates into flooded gardens where children's toys and broken furniture floated as if put there just to mar and pucker the reflection of the heavens, or through windows whose shutters had been torn loose and glass shattered by the nomad blast into now-roofless rooms that were snapshots of ordinary lives in their moments of ending.

  In the five days since the Corn Parade Ish had slept no more than ten or twelve hours. Most of the rest of the 219th had died at the temple, among the massed cohorts of Isin lining the parade route in their blue dress uniforms and golden vacuum armour - they hadn't had wives, or hadn't let the wives they did have talk them into extending their leaves to attend picnics with their in-laws, or hadn't been able to abuse their under-officers' warrants to extend their leaves when others couldn't. Most of the temple soldiery had died along with them, and for the first three days Ish had been just a volunteer with a shovel, fighting fires, filling sandwalls, clearing debris. On the fourth day the surviving priests and temple military apparatus had pulled themselves together into something resembling a command structure, and now Ish had this scratch squad, himself and three soldiers from different units, and this mission, mapping the flood zone, to what purpose Ish didn't know or much care. They'd been issued weapons but Ish had put a stop to that, confiscating the squad's ammunition and retaining just one clip for himself.

  "Is that a body?" said one of the men suddenly. Ish couldn't remember his name. A clerk, from an engineering company, his shoulder patch a stylized basket. Ish looked to where he was pointing. In the shadows behind a broken window was a couch, and on it a bundle of sticks that might have been a man.

  "Wait here," Ish said.

  "We're not supposed to go inside," said one of the other men, a scout carrying a bulky map book and sketchpad, as Ish hoisted himself over the gate. "We're just supposed to mark the house for the civilians."

  "Who says?" asked the clerk.

  "Command," said the scout.

  "There's no command," said the fourth man. He was an artillerist, twice Ish's age, heavy and morose. These were the first words he'd spoken all day. "The Lady's dead. There's no command. There's no officers. There's just men giving orders."

  The clerk and the scout looked at Ish, who said nothing.

  He pulled himself over the gate.

  The Lady's dead. The artillerist's words, or ones like them, had been rattling around Ish's head for days, circling, leaping out to catch him whenever he let his guard down. Gula, the Lady of Isin, is dead. Every time Ish allowed himself to remember that it was as if he was understanding it for the first time, the shock of it like a sudden and unbroken fall, the grief and shame of it a monumental weight toppling down on him. Each time Ish forced the knowledge back the push he gave it was a little weaker, the space he created for himself to breathe and think and feel in a little smaller. He was keeping himself too busy to sleep because every time he closed his eyes he saw the Lady's pleading face.

  He climbed over the windowsill and into the house.

  The body of a very old man was curled up there, dressed in nothing but a dirty white loincloth that matched the colour of the man's hair and beard and the curls on his narrow chest. In the man's bony hands an icon of Lady Gula was clutched, a cheap relief with machine-printed colours that didn't quite line up with the ceramic curves, the Lady's robes more blue than purple and the heraldic dog at her feet more green than yellow; the sort of thing that might be sold in any back-alley liquor store. One corner had been broken off, so that the Lady's right shoulder and half her face were gone, and only one eye peered out from between the man's knuckles. When Ish moved to take the icon, the fingers clutched more tightly, and the old man's eyelids fluttered as a rasp of breath escaped his lips.

  Ish released the icon. Its one-eyed stare now seemed accusatory.

  "Okay," he said heavily. "Okay, Granddad."

  Babylon City 1:1 5" N:1 16" / 34821.1.14 7:15

  "Lord Ninurta vows justice for Lady of Isin"

  "Police to protect law-abiding nomads"

  "Lawlessness in Sippar"

  - Headlines,

  temple newspaper Mardukna?ir,

  Babylon City

  Babylon City 4:142 113" S:4 12" / 34821.1.15 1:3

  "Pointless revenge mission"

  "Lynchings in Babylon: immigrants targeted"

  "Sippar rises up"

  - Headlines,

  radical newspaper Iïnshushaqiï,

  Babylon City

  Gish, Nippur, Sippar (various locations) / 34821.1.15

  "They can die"

  - Graffiti common in working-class and slave districts, after the nomad attack on Isin

  3. Kinetic penetrator

  When Tara came home she found Ish on a bench in the courtyard, bent over the broken icon, with a glue pot and an assortment of scroll clips and elastic bands from Tara's desk. They'd talked, when they first moved into this house not long after Mâra was born, of turning one of th
e ground-floor rooms into a workshop for Ish, but he was home so rarely and for such short periods that what with one thing and another it had never happened. She kept gardening supplies there now.

  The projector in the courtyard was showing some temple news feed, an elaborately animated diagram of the nomads' weapon - a "kinetic penetrator," the researcher called it, a phrase that Tara thought should describe something found in a sex shop or perhaps a lumberyard - striking the city's outer shell, piercing iron and ice and rock before erupting in a molten plume from the steps directly beneath the Lady's feet.

  Tara turned it off.

  Ish looked up. "You're back," he said.

  "You stole my line," said Tara. She sat on the bench next to Ish and looked down at the icon in his lap. "What's that?"

  "An old man gave it to me," Ish said. "There." He wrapped a final elastic band around the icon and set it down next to the glue pot. "That should hold it."

  He'd found the broken corner of the icon on the floor not far from the old man's couch. On Ish's orders they'd abandoned the pointless mapping expedition and taken the man to an aid station, bullied the doctors until someone took responsibility.

  There, in the aid tent, the man pressed the icon into Ish's hands, both pieces, releasing them with shaking fingers.

  "Lady bless you," he croaked.

  The artillerist, at Ish's elbow, gave a bitter chuckle, but didn't say anything. Ish was glad of that. The man might be right, there might be no command, there might be no soldiery, Ish might not be an under-officer any more, just a man giving orders. But Ish was, would continue to be, a soldier of the Lady, a soldier of the city of Isin, and if he had no lawful orders that only put the burden on him to order himself.