Engineering Infinity

by Charles Stross

  He was glad the artillerist hadn't spoken, because if the man had at that moment said again the Lady's dead, Ish was reasonably sure he would have shot him.

  He'd unzipped the flap on the left breast pocket of his jumpsuit and tucked both pieces of the icon inside. Then he'd zipped the pocket closed again, and for the first time in five days, he'd gone home.

  Tara said: "Now that you're back, I wish you'd talk to Mâra. She's been having nightmares. About the Corn Parade. She's afraid the nomads might blow up her school."

  "They might," Ish said.

  "You're not helping." Tara sat up straight. She took his chin in her hand and turned his head to face her. "When did you last sleep?"

  Ish pulled away from her. "I took pills."

  Tara sighed. "When did you last take a pill?"

  "Yesterday," Ish said. "No. Day before."

  "Come to bed," said Tara. She stood up. Ish didn't move. He glanced down at the icon.

  An ugly expression passed briefly over Tara's face, but Ish didn't see it.

  "Come to bed," she said again. She took Ish's arm, and this time he allowed himself to be led up the stairs.

  At some point in the night they made love. It wasn't very good for either of them; it hadn't been for a long while, but this night was worse. Afterwards Tara slept.

  She woke to find Ish already dressed. He was putting things into his soldiery duffle.

  "Where are you going?" she asked.

  "Lagash."

  "What?"

  Tara sat up. Ish didn't look at her.

  "Lord Ninurta's fitting out an expedition," Ish said.

  "An expedition," said Tara flatly.

  "To find the nomads who killed the Lady."

  "And do what?" asked Tara.

  Ish didn't answer. From his dresser he picked up his identification seal, the cylinder with the Lady's heraldic dog and Ish's name and Temple registry number, and fastened it around his neck.

  Tara turned away.

  "I don't think I ever knew you," she said, "But I always knew I couldn't compete with a goddess. When I married you, I said to my friends, 'At least he won't be running around after other women.'" She laughed without humour. "And now she's dead - and you're still running after her."

  She looked up. Ish was gone.

  Outside it was hot and windless under a lowering sky. Nothing was moving. A fine grey dust was settling over the sector: the Lady's ashes, Ish had heard people call it. His jump boots left prints in it as he carried his duffle to the train station.

  An express took Ish to the base of the nearest spoke, and from there his soldiery ID and a series of elevators carried him to the southern polar dock. As the equatorial blue and white of the city's habitable zone gave way to the polished black metal of the southern hemisphere, Ish looked down at the apparently untroubled clouds and seas ringing the city's equator and it struck him how normal this all was, how like any return to duty after leave.

  It would have been easy and perhaps comforting to pretend it was just that, comforting to pretend that the Corn Parade had ended like every other, with the Lady's blessing on the crops, the return of the images to the shrines, drinking and dancing and music from the dimming of the Lady's House at dusk to its brightening at dawn.

  Ish didn't want that sort of comfort.

  34821.6.29 5:23:5:12.102

  Abstract of report prepared by priest-astronomers of Ur under the direction of Shamash of Sippar, at the request of Ninurta of Lagash.

  Isotopic analysis of recovered penetrator fragments indicates the nomad weapon to have been constructed within and presumably fired from the Apsu near debris belt. Astronomical records are surveyed for suspicious occlusions, both of nearby stars in the Babylon globular cluster and of more distant stars in the Old Galaxy, and cross-referenced against traffic records to eliminate registered nomad vessels. Fifteen anomalous occlusions, eleven associated with mapped point mass Sinkalamaïdi-541, are identified over a period of one hundred thirty-two years. An orbit for the Corn Parade criminals is proposed.

  4. Dog soldier

  There was a thump as Ish's platform was loaded onto the track. Then Sharur's catapult engaged and two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty times the force of Isin's equatorial rotation pushed Ish into his thrust bag; and then Ish was flying free.

  In his ear, the voice of the ship said:

  - First company, dispersion complete.

  On the control console, affixed there, sealed into a block of clear resin: Gula's icon. Ish wondered if this was what she wanted.

  And Ninurta added, for Ish's ears alone:

  - Good hunting, dog soldier.

  At Lagash they'd wanted Ish to join the soldiery of Lagash; had offered him the chance to compete for a place with the Lion-Eagles, Ninurta's elites. Ish had refused, taking the compassion of these warlike men of a warlike city for contempt. Isin was sparsely populated for a city of Babylon, with barely fifty billion spread among its parks and fields and orchards, but its soldiery was small even for that. When the hard men in Ashur and the actuaries in Babylon-Borsippa counted up the cities' defenders, they might forget Lady Gula's soldiers, and be forgiven for forgetting. What Ninurta's men meant as generosity to a grieving worshipper of their lord's consort Ish took for mockery of a parade soldier from a rustic backwater. It needed the intervention of the god himself to make a compromise; this after Ish had lost his temper, broken the recruiter's tablet over his knee and knocked over his writing-table.

  "You loved her - dog soldier."

  Ish turned to see who had spoken, and saw a god in the flesh for the first time.

  The Lord of Lagash was tall, five cubits at least, taller than any man, but the shape and set of his body in its coppery-red armour made it seem that it was the god who was to scale and everything around him - the recruiting office, the Lion-Eagles who had been ready to lay hands on Ish and who were now prostrate on the carpet, the wreckage of the recruiter's table, Ish himself - that was small. The same agelessness was in Ninurta's dark-eyed face that had been in Lady Gula's, but what in the Lady had seemed to Ish a childlike simplicity retained into adulthood was turned, in her consort, to a precocious maturity, a wisdom beyond the unlined face's years.

  Ish snapped to attention. "Lord," he said. He saluted - as he would have saluted a superior officer. A murmur of outrage came from the Lion-Eagles on the floor.

  The god ignored them. "You loved her," he said again, and he reached out and lifted Ish's seal-cylinder where it hung around his neck, turned it in his fingers to examine the dog figure, to read Ish's name and number.

  "No, Lord Ninurta," Ish said.

  The god looked from the seal to Ish's face.

  "No?" he said, and there was something dangerous in his voice. His fist closed around the seal.

  Ish held the god's gaze.

  "I still love her," he said.

  Ish had been prepared to hate the Lord of Lagash, consort of the Lady of Isin. When Ish thought of god and goddess together his mind slipped and twisted and turned away from the idea; when he'd read the god's proclamation of intent to hunt down the nomads that had murdered "his" lady, Ish's mouth had curled in an involuntary sneer. If the Lord of Lagash had tried to take the seal then, Ish would have fought him, and died.

  But the god's fist opened. He glanced at the seal again and let it drop.

  The god's eyes met Ish's eyes, and in them Ish saw a pain that was at least no less real and no less rightful than Ish's own.

  "So do I," Ninurta said.

  Then he turned to his soldiers.

  "As you were," he told them. And, when they had scrambled to their feet, he pointed to Ish. "Ishmenininsina Ninnadiïnshumi is a solder of the city of Isin," he told them. "He remains a soldier of the city of Isin. He is your brother. All Lady Gula's soldiers are your brothers. Treat them like brothers."

  To Ish he said, "We'll hunt nomads together, dog soldier."

  "I'd like that," Ish said. "Lord."

  Ninurta's mouth
crooked into a half-smile, and Ish saw what the Lady of Isin might have loved in the Lord of Lagash.

  For the better part of a year the hunters built, they trained, they changed and were changed - modified, by the priest-engineers who served Ninagal of Akkad and the priest-doctors who had served Lady Gula, their hearts and bones strengthened to withstand accelerations that would kill any ordinary mortal, their nerves and chemistries changed to let them fight faster and harder and longer than anything living, short of a god.

  The point mass where the priest-astronomers of Ur thought the hunters would find the nomad camp was far out into Apsu, the diffuse torus of ice and rock and wandering planetary masses that separated Babylon from the nearest stars. The detritus of Apsu was known, mapped long ago down to the smallest fragment by Sin and Shamash, and the nomads' work had left a trail that the knowledgeable could read.

  The object the nomads' weapon orbited was one of the largest in the near reaches of Apsu, the superdense core of some giant star that had shed most of its mass long before the Flood, leaving only this degenerate, slowly cooling sphere, barely a league across. The gods had long since oriented it so the jets of radiation from its rapidly spinning magnetic poles pointed nowhere near the cities, moved it into an orbit where it would threaten the cities neither directly with its own gravity, nor by flinging comets and planetesimals down into Babylon.

  It took the hunters two hundred days to reach it.

  The great ship Sharur, the Mace of Ninurta, a god in its own right, was hauled along the surface of Lagash to the city's equator, fuelled, armed, loaded with the hunters and all their weapons and gear, and set loose.

  It dropped away slowly at first, but when the ship was far enough from the city its sails opened, and in every city of Babylon it was as if a cloud moved between the land and the shining houses of the gods, as the power of Ninagal's ring was bent to stopping Sharur in its orbit. Then the Mace of Ninurta folded its sails like the wings of a diving eagle and fell, gathering speed. The black circle that was Tiamat's event horizon grew until it swallowed half the sky, until the soldiers packed tight around the ship's core passed out in their thrust bags and even Sharur's prodigiously strong bones creaked under the stress, until the hunters were so close that the space-time around them whirled around Tiamat like water. Ninagal's ring flashed by in an instant, and only Lord Ninurta and Sharur itself were conscious to see it. Sharur shot forward, taking with it some tiny fraction of the black hole's unimaginable angular momentum.

  And then Tiamat was behind them, and they were headed outward.

  Babylon City 1:1 5" N:1 16" / 34822.7.18 7:15

  "All cities' prayers with Lord of Lagash"

  "Police seek nomad agents in Babylon"

  "Lord Shamash asks Lord Anshar to restore order"

  - Headlines,

  temple newspaper Mardukna?ir,

  Babylon City

  Babylon City 4:142 113" S:4 12" / 34822.7.16 1:3

  "An eye for an eye"

  "Nativist witch-hunt"

  "Ashur to invade Sippar"

  - Headlines,

  radical newspaper Iïnshushaqiï,

  Babylon City

  5. Machines

  At Lagash they had drilled a double dozen scenarios: city-sized habitats, ramship fleets, dwarf planets threaded with ice tunnels like termite tracks in old wood. When the cities fought among themselves the territory was known and the weapons were familiar. The vacuum armour Ish had worn as a Surface Tactical was not very different from what a soldier of Lagash or Ashur or Akkad would wear although the gear of those warlike cities was usually newer and there was more of it. The weapons the Surface Tacticals carried were deadly enough to ships or to other vacuum troops, and the soldiers of the interior had aircraft and artillery and even fusion bombs although no one had used fusion bombs within a city in millennia. But there had been nothing like the nomads' weapon, nothing that could threaten the fabric of a city. No one could say with certainty what they might meet when they found the nomad encampment.

  Ish had seen nomad ships in dock at Isin. There were ramships no larger than canal barges that could out-accelerate a troopship and push the speed of light, and ion-drive ships so dwarfed by their fuel supplies that they were like inhabited comets, and fragile light-sailers whose mirrors were next to useless at Babylon, and every one was unique. Ish supposed you had to be crazy to take it into your head to spend a lifetime in a pressurized can ten trillion leagues from whatever you called home. There wouldn't be many people as crazy as that and also able enough to keep a ship in working order for all that time, even taking into account that you had to be crazy in the first place to live in the rubble around a star when you could be living in a city.

  But that wasn't right either. Because most of the people that in Babylon they called nomads had been born out there on their planets or wherever, where there were no cities and no gods, with as much choice about where they lived as a limpet on a rock. It was only the crazy ones that had a choice and only the crazy ones that made it all the way to Babylon.

  The nomads Ish was hunting now, the assassins somewhere out there in the dark, he thought were almost simple by comparison. They had no gods and could build no cities and they knew it and it made them angry and so whatever they couldn't have, they smashed. That was a feeling Ish could understand.

  Gods and cities fought for primacy, they fought for influence or the settlement of debts. They didn't fight wars of extermination. But extermination was what the nomads had raised the stakes to when they attacked the Corn Parade and extermination was what Ish was armed for now.

  - There, said Sharur's voice in his ear. - There is their weapon.

  In the X-ray spectrum Sinkalamaïdi-541 was one of the brightest objects in the sky, but to human eyes, even augmented as Ish's had been at Lagash, even here, less than half a million leagues from the target, what visible light it gave off as it cooled made it only an unusually bright star, flickering as it spun. Even under the magnification of Sharur's sharp eyes it was barely a disc; but Ish could see that something marred it, a dark line across the sickly glowing face.

  A display square opened, the dead star's light masked by the black disc of a coronagraph, reflected light - from the dead star itself, from the living stars of the surrounding cluster, from the Old Galaxy - amplified and enhanced. Girdling Sinkalamaïdi-541 was a narrow, spinning band of dull carbon, no more than a thousand leagues across, oriented to draw energy from the dead star's magnetic field; like a mockery of Ninagal's ring.

  - A loop accelerator, the ship said. - Crude but effective.

  - They must be very sophisticated to aspire to such crudeness, said Ninurta. - We have found the sling, but where is the slinger?

  When straight out of the temple orphanage he'd first enlisted they'd trained Ish as a rifleman, and when he'd qualified for Surface Tactical School they'd trained him as a vacuum armour operator. What he was doing now, controlling this platform that had been shot down an electromagnetic rail like a corn can, was not very much like either of those jobs, although the platform's calculus of fuel and velocity and power and heat was much the same as for the vacuum armour. But he was not a Surface Tactical anymore and there was no surface here, no city with its weak gravity and strong spin to complicate the equations, only speed and darkness and somewhere in the darkness the target.

  There was no knowing what instruments the nomads had but Ish hoped to evade all of them. The platform's outer shell was black in short wavelengths and would scatter or let pass long ones; the cold face it turned toward the nomad weapon was chilled to within a degree of the cosmic microwave background, and its drives were photonic, the exhaust a laser-tight collimated beam. Eventually some platform would occlude a star or its drive beam would touch some bit of ice or cross some nomad sensor's mirror and they would be discovered, but not quickly and not all at once.

  They would be on the nomads long before that.

  - Third company, Ninurta said. - Fire on the ring. Flush them
out.

  The platforms had been fired from Sharur's catapults in an angled pattern so that part of the energy of the launch went to slowing Sharur itself and part to dispersing the platforms in an irregular spreading cone that by this time was the better part of a thousand leagues across. Now the platforms' own engines fired, still at angles oblique to the line joining Sharur's course to the dead star.

  Below Ish - subjectively - and to his left, a series of blinking icons indicated that the platforms of the third company were separating themselves still further, placing themselves more squarely in the track of the dead star's orbit. When they were another thousand leagues distant from Sharur they cast their weapons loose and the weapons' own engines fired, bright points Ish could see with his own eyes, pushing the weapons onward with a force beyond what even the hunters' augmented and supported bodies could withstand.

  Time passed. The flares marking the weapons of the third company went out one by one as their fuel was exhausted. When they were three hundred thousand leagues from the ring, the longest-ranged of the weapons - antiproton beams, muon accelerators, fission-pumped gamma-ray lasers - began to fire.

  Before the bombardment could possibly have reached the ring - long before there had passed the thirty or forty grains required for the bombardment to reach the ring and the light of the bombardment's success or failure to return to Sharur and the platforms - the space between the ring and the third company filled with fire. Explosions flared all across Ish's field of view, pinpoints of brilliant white, shading to ultraviolet. Something hit the side of the platform with a terrific thump, and Ish's hand squeezed convulsively on the weapon release as his diagnostic screens became a wash of red. There was a series of smaller thumps as the weapons came loose, and then a horrible grinding noise as at least one encountered some projecting tangle of bent metal and broken ceramic. The platform was tumbling. About half Ish's reaction control thrusters claimed to be working; he fired them in pairs and worked the gyroscopes till the tumble was reduced to a slow roll, while the trapped weapon scraped and bumped its way across the hull and finally came free.