Engineering Infinity (31 page)

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.

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.