Engineering Infinity (30 page)

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.

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, knocking 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 the 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.