Engineering Infinity (33 page)

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, but 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.

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.

He set the coordinates and
readied himself. The complex calculations spread on a screen before him and a
high tone sounded
screeeee
in his ears. A sickening
gyre began. The whirl of space-time made gravity spread outward from him,
pulling at his legs and arms as the satin blur of colour swirled past the
transparent walls.
Screeeee...

For Warren the past was a vast
sheet of darkness, mired in crimes immemorial, each horror like a shining,
vibrant, blood-red bonfire in the gloom, calling to him.

He began to see that at school.
History instruction then was a multishow of images, sounds, scents and touches.
The past came to the schoolboys as a sensory immersion. Social adjustment
policy in those times was clear: only by deep sensing of what the past world
was truly like could moral understanding occur. The technologies gave a
reasonable immersion in eras, conveying why people thought or did things back
then. So he saw the dirty wars, the horrifying ideas, the tragedies and
comedies of those eras...and longed for them.

They seemed somehow more real.
The smart world everyone knew had embedded intelligences throughout, which made
it dull, predictable. Warren was always the brightest in his classes, and he
got bored.

He was fifteen when he learned of
serial killers.

The teacher - Ms Sheila Weiss,
lounged back on her desk with legs crossed, her slanted red mouth and lifted
black eyebrows conveying her humour - said that quite precisely, “serials” were
those who murdered three or more people over a period of more than thirty days,
with a “cooling off” period between each murder. The pattern was quite old, not
a mere manifestation of their times, Miss Weiss said. Some sources suggested
that legends such as werewolves and vampires were inspired by medieval serial
killers. Through all that history, their motivation for killing was the lure of
“psychological gratification” - whatever that meant, Warren thought.

Ms Weiss went on: Some transfixed
by the power of life and death were attracted to medical professions. These “angels
of death” - or as they self-described, angels of mercy - were the worst, for
they killed so many. One Harold Shipman, an English family doctor, made it seem
as though his victims had died of natural causes. Between 1975 and 1998, he
murdered at least two hundred and fifteen patients. Ms Weiss added that he
might have murdered two hundred and fifty or more.