Engineering Infinity

by Charles Stross

  - Machines, machines! he heard Ninurta say. - Cowards! Where are the men?

  Then the weapon, whichever it was, blew up.

  34822.7.16 4:24:6:20 - 5:23:10:13

  Moving image, recorded at 24 frames per second over a period of 117 minutes 15 seconds by spin-stabilized camera, installation "Cyrus," transmitted via QT to COS Liberation, on Gaugamela station, and onward to Community Outreach archives, Urizen:

  From the leading edge of the accelerator ring, it is as though the ring and the mass that powers it are rising through a tunnel of light.

  For ten million kilometres along the track of the neutron star's orbit, the darkness ahead sparkles with the light of antimatter bombs, fusion explosions, the kinetic flash of chaff thrown out by the accelerator ring impacting ships, missiles, remotely operated guns; impacting men. Through the minefield debris of the ring's static defences, robotic fighters dart and weave, looking to kill anything that accelerates. Outreach has millennia of experience to draw on, and back in the Community a population of hundreds of billions to produce its volunteer missionaries, its dedicated programmers, its hobbyist generals. Many of the Babylonian weapons are stopped; many of the Babylonian ships are destroyed. Others, already close to Babylon's escape velocity and by the neutron star's orbital motion close to escaping from it as well, are shunted aside, forced into hyperbolic orbits that banish them from the battlefield as surely as death.

  But the ring's defenders are fighting from the bottom of a deep gravity well, with limited resources, nearly all the mass they've assembled here incorporated into the ring itself; and the Babylonians have their own store of ancient cunning to draw on, their aggregate population a hundred times larger than the Community's, more closely knit and more warlike. And they have Ninurta.

  Ninurta, the hunter of the Annunaki, the god who slew the seven-headed serpent, who slew the bull-man in the sea and the six-headed wild ram in the mountain, who defeated the demon Ansu and retrieved the Tablet of Destinies.

  Sharur, the Mace of Ninurta, plunges through the battle like a shark through minnows, shining like a sun, accelerating, adding the thrust of its mighty engines to the neutron star's inexorable pull. Slender needles of laser prick out through the debris, and Sharur's sun brightens still further, painful to look at, the ship's active hull heated to tens of thousands of degrees. Something like a swarm of fireflies swirls out toward it, and the camera's filters cut in, darkening the sky as the warheads explode around the ship, a constellation of new stars that flare, burn and die in perfect silence: and Sharur keeps coming.

  It fills the view.

  Overhead, a blur, it flashes past the camera, and is gone.

  The image goes white.

  The transmission ends.

  6. Surviving weapons

  It was cold in the control capsule. The heat sink was still deployed and the motors that should have folded it in would not respond. Ish found he didn't much care. There was a slow leak somewhere in the atmosphere cycler and Ish found he didn't much care about that either.

  The battle, such as it was, was well off to one side. Ish knew even before doing the math that he did not have enough fuel to bring himself back into it. The dead star was bending his course but not enough. He was headed into the dark.

  Ish's surviving weapons were still burning mindlessly toward the ring and had cut by half the velocity with which they were speeding away from it, but they too were nearly out of fuel and Ish saw that they would follow him into darkness.

  He watched Sharur's plunge through the battle. The dead star was between him and the impact when it happened, but he saw the effect it had: a flash across the entire spectrum from long-wave radio to hard X-ray, bright enough to illuminate the entire battlefield; bright enough, probably, to be seen from the cities.

  Another god died.

  There was a sparkle of secondary explosions scattered through the debris field, weapons and platforms and nomad fighters alike flashing to plasma in the light of Ninurta's death. Then there was nothing.

  The ring began, slowly, to break up.

  Ish wondered how many other platforms were still out here, set aside like his, falling into Apsu. Anyone who had been on the impact side was dead.

  The weapons' drive flares went out.

  The mended icon was still where he had fixed it. Ish shut down the displays one by one until his helmet beam was the only light and adjusted the thrust bag around the helmet so that the beam shone full on the icon. The look in the Lady's eyes no longer seemed accusatory, but appraising, as if she were waiting to see what Ish would do.

  The beam wavered and went dark.

  Babylon City 2:78 233" S:2 54" / 34822.10.6 5:18:4

  Record of police interrogation, Suspect 34822.10. 6.502155, alias Ajabeli Huzalatum Taraämapsu, alias Liburnadisha Iliawilimrabi Apsuümasha, alias "Black," Charges: subversion, terrorism, falsification of temple records, failure to register as a foreign agent. Interrogator is Detective (Second Degree) Nabûnaïd Babilisheïr Rabi?ila.

  Rabi?ila: Your people are gone. Your weapon's been destroyed. You might as well tell us everything.

  Suspect: It accomplished its purpose.

  Rabi?ila: Which was?

  Suspect: To give you hope.

  Rabi?ila: What do you mean, "hope"?

  Suspect: Men are fighting gods now, in Gish and Sippar.

  Rabi?ila: A few criminal lunatics. Lord Anshar will destroy them.

  Suspect: Do you think they'll be the last? Two of your gods are dead. Dead at the hands of mortals. Nothing Anshar's soldiers do to Sippar will change that. Nothing you do to me.

  Rabi?ila: You're insane.

  Suspect: I mean it. One day - not in my lifetime, certainly not in yours, but one day - one day you'll all be free.

  7. A soldier of the city

  A ship found Ish a few months later: a ship called Upekkhâ, from a single-system nomad civilization based some seventeen light-years from Babylon and known to itself as the Congregation. The ship, the name of which meant "equanimity," was an antimatter-fuelled ion rocket, a quarter of a league long and twice that in diameter; it could reach two-tenths the speed of light, but only very, very slowly. It had spent fifteen years docked at Babylon-Borsippa, and, having been launched some four months before the attack on the Corn Parade, was now on its way back to the star the Congregation called Mettâ. The star's name, in the ancient liturgical language of the monks and nuns of the Congregation, meant "kindness."

  Ish was very nearly dead when Upekkhâ's monks brought him aboard. His heart had been stopped for some weeks, and it was the acceleration support system rather than Ish's bloodstream that was supplying the last of the platform's oxygen reserves to his brain, which itself had been pumped full of cryoprotectants and cooled to just above the boiling point of nitrogen. The rescue team had to move very quickly to extricate Ish from that system and get him onto their own life support. This task was not made any easier by the militarized physiology given to Ish at Lagash, but they managed it. He was some time in recovering.

  Ish never quite understood what had brought Upekkhâ to Babylon. Most of the monks and nuns spoke good Babylonian - several of them had been born in the cities - but the concepts were too alien for Ish to make much sense of them, and Ish admitted to himself he didn't really care to try. They had no gods, and prayed - as far as Ish could tell - to their ancestors, or their teachers' teachers. They had been looking, they said, for someone they called Tathâgata, which the nun explaining this to Ish translated into Babylonian as "the one who has found the truth." This Tathâgata had died, many years ago on a planet circling the star called Mettâ, and why the monks and nuns were looking for him at Babylon was only one of the things Ish didn't understand.

  "But we didn't find him," the nun said. "We found you."

  They were in Upekkhâ's central core, where Ish, who had grown up on a farm, was trying to learn how to garden in free fall. The monks and nuns had given him to understand that he was not required to work, b
ut he found it embarrassing to lie idle - and it was better than being alone with his thoughts.

  "And what are you going to do with me?" Ish asked.

  The nun - whose own name, Arakkhasampada, she translated as "the one who has attained watchfulness" - gave him an odd look and said:

  "Nothing."

  "Aren't you afraid I'll - do something? Damage something? Hurt someone?" Ish asked.

  "Will you?" Arakkhasampada asked.

  Ish had thought about it. Encountering the men and women of Upekkhâ on the battlefield he could have shot them without hesitation. In Apsu, he had not hesitated. He had looked forward to killing the nomads responsible for the Corn Parade with an anticipation that was two parts vengefulness and one part technical satisfaction. But these nomads were not those nomads, and it was hard now to see the point.

  It must have been obvious, from where the monks and nuns found Ish, and in what condition, what he was, and what he had done. But they seemed not to care. They treated Ish kindly, but Ish suspected they would have done as much for a wounded dog.

  The thought was humbling, but Ish also found it oddly liberating. The crew of Upekkhâ didn't know who Ish was or what he had been trying to do, or why. His failure was not evident to them.

  The doctor, an elderly monk who Ish called Doctor Sam - his name, which Ish couldn't pronounce, meant something like "the one who leads a balanced life" - pronounced Ish fit to move out of the infirmary. Arrakhasamyada and Doctor Sam helped Ish decorate his cabin, picking out plants from the garden and furnishings from Upekkhâ's sparse catalogue with a delicate attention to Ish's taste and reactions that surprised him, so that the end result, while hardly Babylonian, was less foreign, more Ish's own, than it might have been.

  Arrakhasamyada asked about the mended icon in its block of resin, and Ish tried to explain.

  She and Doctor Sam grew very quiet and thoughtful.

  Ish didn't see either of them for eight or ten days. Then one afternoon as he was coming back from the garden, dusty and tired, he found the two of them waiting by his cabin. Arrakhasamyada was carrying a bag of oranges, and Doctor Sam had with him a large box made to look like lacquered wood.

  Ish let them in, and went into the back of the cabin to wash and change clothes. When he came out they had unpacked the box, and Ish saw that it was an iconostasis or shrine, of the sort the monks and nuns used to remember their predecessors. But where the name-scroll would go there was a niche just the size of Ish's icon.

  He didn't know who he was. He was still, - would always be, - a soldier of the city, but what did that mean? He had wanted revenge, still did in some abstract way. There would be others, now, Lion-Eagles out to avenge the Lord of Lagash, children who had grown up with images of the Corn Parade. Maybe Mâra would be among them, though Ish hoped not. But Ish himself had had his measure of vengeance in Apsu and knew well enough that it had never been likely that he would have more.

  He looked at the icon where it was propped against the wall. Who was he? Tara: "I don't think I ever knew you." But she had, hadn't she? Ish was a man in love with a dead woman. He always would be. The Lady's death hadn't changed that, any more than Ish's own death would have. The fact that the dead woman was a goddess hadn't changed it.

  Ish picked up the icon and placed it in the niche. He let Doctor Sam show him where to place the orange, how to set the sticks of incense in the cup and start the little induction heater. Then he sat back on his heels and they contemplated the face of the Lady of Isin together.

  "Will you tell us about her?" Arrakhasamyada asked.

  Mercies

  Gregory Benford

  Gregory Benford has published over forty books, mostly novels. Nearly all remain in print, some after a quarter of a century. His fiction has won many awards, including the Nebula Award for his novel Timescape. A winner of the United Nations Medal for Literature, he is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, was Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and in 1995 received the Lord Prize for contributions to science. He won the Japan Seiun Award for Dramatic Presentation with his 7-hour series, A Galactic Odyssey. In 2007 he won the Asimov Award for science writing. In 2006 he co-founded Genescient, a biotech company devoted to extending human longevity.

  His story here evolved after he wrote the entry on the concept of time in Seeing Further: An Anthology of Science Writing Celebrating The 350th Birth of the Royal Society.

  "All scientific work is, of course, based on some conscious or subconscious philosophical attitude."

  - Werner Heisenberg

  He rang the doorbell and heard its buzz echo in the old wooden house. Footsteps. The worn, scarred door eased open half an inch and a narrowed brown eye peered at him.

  "Mr Hanson?" Warren asked in a bland bureaucratic tone, the accent a carefully rehearsed approximation of the flat Midwestern that would arouse no suspicions here.

  "Yeah, so?" The mouth jittered, then straightened.

  "I need to speak to you about your neighbour. We're doing a security background check."

  The eye swept up and down Warren's three-piece suit, dark tie, polished shoes - traditional styles, or as the advertisements of this era said, "timeless." Warren was even sporting a grey fedora with a snap band.

  "Which neighbour?"

  This he hadn't planned on. Alarm clutched at his throat. Instead of speaking he nodded at the house to his right. Daniel Hanson's eye slid that way, then back, and narrowed some more. "Lemme see ID."

  This Warren had expected. He showed an FBI ID in a plastic case, up-to-date and accurate. The single eye studied it and Warren wondered what to do if the door slammed shut. Maybe slide around to the window, try to -

  The door jerked open. Hanson was a wiry man with shaggy hair - a bony framework, all joints and hinges. His angular face jittered with concern and Warren asked, "You are the Hanson who works at Allied Mechanical?"

  The hooded eyes jerked again as Warren stepped into the room.

  "Uh, yeah, but hey - whassit matter if you're askin' 'bout the neighbour?"

  Warren moved to his left to get Hanson away from the windows. "I just need the context in security matters of this sort."

  "You're wastin' your time, see, I don't know 'bout -"

  Warren opened his briefcase casually and in one fluid move brought the short automatic pistol out. Hanson froze. He fired straight into Hanson's chest. The popping sound was no louder than a dropped glass would make as the silencer soaked up the noise.

  Hanson staggered back, his mouth gaping, sucking in air. Warren stepped forward, just as he had practiced, and carefully aimed again. The second shot hit Hanson squarely in the forehead and the man went down backward, thumping on the thin rug.

  Warren listened. No sound from outside.

  It was done. His first, and just about as he had envisioned it. In the sudden silence he heard his heart hammering.

  He had read from the old texts that professional hit men of this era used the 0.22 automatic pistol despite its low calibre, and now he saw why. Little noise, especially with the suppressor, and the gun rode easily in his hand. The silencer would have snagged if he had carried it in a coat pocket. In all, his plans had worked. The pistol was light, strong, and - befitting its mission - a brilliant white.

  The dark red pool spreading from Hanson's skull was a clear sign that this man, who would have tortured, hunted, and killed many women, would never get his chance now.

  Further, the light 0.22 slug had stayed inside the skull, ricocheting so that it could never be identified as associated with this pistol. This point was also in the old texts, just as had been the detailed blueprints. With those, making the pistol and ammunition was simple using his home replicator machine.

  He moved through the old house, floors creaking, and systematically searched Hanson's belongings. Here again the old texts were useful, leading him to the automatic pistol taped under a dresser drawer. No sign yet of the rifle Hanson had used
in the open woods, either.

  It was amazing, what twenty-first century journals carried, in their sensual fascination with the romantic aura of crime. He found no signs of victims' clothing, of photos or mementos - all mementoes Hanson had collected in Warren's timeline. Daniel Hanson took his victims into the woods near here, where he would let them loose and then hunt and kill them. His first known killing lay three months ahead of this day. The timestream was quite close, in quantum coordinates, so Warren could be sure that this Hanson was very nearly identical to the Hanson of Warren's timeline. They were adjacent in a sense he did not pretend to understand, beyond the cartoons in popular science books.

  Excellent. Warren had averted a dozen deaths. He brimmed with pride.

  He needed to get away quickly, back to the transflux cage. With each tick of time the transflux cage's location became more uncertain.

  On the street outside he saw faces looking at him through a passing car window, the glass runny with reflected light. But the car just drove on. He made it into the stand of trees and then a kilometre walk took him to the cage. This was as accurate as the quantum flux process made possible during a jogg back through decades. He paused at the entrance hatch, listening. No police sirens. Wind sighed in the boughs. He sucked in the moist air and flashed a supremely happy grin.