Engineering Infinity (6 page)

She knows that.

But he knows she doesn’t feel
good without it.

So he brought it from the old
house. The big house. He found it and gave it back to her.

It makes her happy in a way she
can’t explain.

He says he likes seeing her
happy.

So now that the music’s back, she
plays only happy songs. For him, for her. For Grams and Gramps. For the family.

She plays only happy songs.

And she watches the music dance.

Karl Schroeder

Karl
Schroeder was born in Manitoba, Canada, in 1962. He started writing at age
fourteen, following in the footsteps of A. E. van Vogt, who came from the same
Mennonite community. He moved to Toronto in 1986, and became a founding member
of SF Canada (he was president from 1996 - 97). He sold early stories to
Canadian magazines, and his first novel,
The Claus Effect
(with David Nickle) appeared in 1997. His first solo novel,
Ventus
, was published in 2000, and was followed by
Permanence
and
Lady of Mazes
. His most recent
work is the
Virga
series of science fiction novels (
Sun
of Suns
,
Queen of Candesce
,
Pirate
Sun
, and
The Sunless Countries
).
He also collaborated with Cory Doctorow on
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to
Writing Science Fiction
. Schroeder lives in East Toronto
with his wife and daughter.

The flight had been bumpy; the
landing was equally so, to the point where Gennady was sure the old Tupolev
would blow a tire. Yet his seat-mate hadn’t even shifted position in two hours.
That was fine with Gennady, who had spent the whole trip trying to pretend he
wasn’t there at all.

The young American been a bit
more active during the flight across the Atlantic: at least, his eyes had been
open and Gennady could see coloured lights flickering across them from his
augmented reality glasses. But he had exchanged less than twenty words with
Gennady since they’d left Washington.

In short, he’d been the ideal
travelling companion.

The other four passengers were
stretching and groaning. Gennady poked Ambrose in the side and said, “Wake up.
Welcome to the ninth biggest country in the world.”

Ambrose snorted and sat up. “Brazil?”
he said hopefully. Then he looked out his window. “What the hell?”

The little municipal airport had
a single gate, which as the only plane on the field, they were taxiing up to
uncontested. Over the entrance to the single-story building was the word ‘???????????.’
“Welcome to Stepnogorsk,” said Gennady as he stood to retrieve his luggage from
the overhead rack. He travelled light by habit. Ambrose, he gathered, had done
so from necessity.

“Stepnogorsk...?” Ambrose
shambled after him, a mass of wrinkled clothing leavened with old sweat. “Secret
Soviet town,” he mumbled as they reached the plane’s hatch and a burst of hot
dry air lifted his hair. “Population sixty-thousand,” Ambrose added as he put
his left foot on the metal steps. Halfway down he said, “Manufactured anthrax
bombs in the cold war!” And as he set foot on the tarmac he finished with, “Where
the hell is Kazakhstan...? Oh.”

“Bigger than Western Europe,”
said Gennady. “Ever heard of it?”

“Of course I’ve
heard
of it,” said the youth testily - but Gennady could
see from how he kept his eyes fixed in front of him that he was still
frantically reading about the town from some website or other. In the wan
August sunlight he was taller than Gennady, pale, with stringy hair, and
everything about him soft - a sculpture done in rounded corners. He had a wide
face, though; he might pass for Russian. Gennady clapped him on the shoulder. “Let
me do the talking,” he said as they dragged themselves across the blistering
tarmac to the terminal building.

“So,” said Ambrose, scratching
his neck. “Why are we here?”

“You’re here because you’re with
me. And you needed to disappear, but that doesn’t mean I stop working.”

Gennady glanced around. The
landscape here should look a lot like home, which was only a day’s drive to the
west - and here indeed was that vast sky he remembered from Ukraine. After that
first glance, though, he did a double-take. The dry prairie air normally
smelled of dust and grass at this time of year, and there should have been
yellow grass from here to the flat horizon - but instead the land seemed
blasted, with large patches of bare soil showing. There was only stubble where
there should have been grass. It looked more like Australia than Asia. Even the
trees ringing the airport were dead, just grey skeletons clutching the air.

He thought about climate change
as they walked through the concrete-floored terminal; since they’d cleared
customs in Amsterdam, the bored-looking clerks here just waved them through. “Hang
on,” said Ambrose as he tried to keep up with Gennady’s impatient stride. “I
came to you guys for asylum. Doesn’t that mean you put me up somewhere, some
hotel, you know, away from the action?”

“You can’t get any farther from
the action than this.” They emerged onto a grassy boulevard that hadn’t been
watered nor cut in a long while; the civilized lawn merged seamlessly with the
wild prairie. There was nothing visible from here to the horizon, except in one
direction where a cluster of listless windmills jutted above some low trees.

A single taxicab was sitting at
the crumbled curb.

“Oh, man,” said Ambrose.

Gennady had to smile. “You were
expecting some Black Sea resort, weren’t you?” He slipped into the taxi, which
stank of hot vinyl and motor oil. “Any car rental agency,” he said to the
driver in Russian. “It’s not like you’re some cold war defector,” he continued
to Ambrose in English. “Your benefactor is the U.N. And they don’t have much
money.”

“So you’re what - putting me up
in a
motel
in
Kazakhstan?”
Ambrose struggled to put his outrage into words. “What I saw could -”

“What?” They pulled away from the
curb and became the only car on a cracked blacktop road leading into town.

“Can’t tell you,” mumbled
Ambrose, suddenly looking shifty. “I was told not to tell
you
anything.”

Gennady swore in Ukrainian and
looked away. They drove in silence for a while, until Ambrose said, “So why are
you
here, then? Did you piss somebody off?”

Gennady smothered the urge to
push Ambrose out of the cab. “Can’t tell you,” he said curtly.

“Does it involve SNOPB?” Ambrose
pronounced it
snop-bee
.

Gennady would have been startled
had he not known Ambrose was connected to the net via his glasses. “You show me
yours, I’ll show you mine,” he said. Ambrose snorted in contempt.

They didn’t speak for the rest of
the drive.

“Let me get this straight,” said
Gennady later that evening. “He says he’s being chased by Russian agents, NASA,
and
Google?”

On the other end of the line,
Eleanor Frankl sighed. “I’m sorry we dumped him on you at the airport,” said
the New York director of the International Atomic Energy Agency. She was
Gennady’s boss for this new and - so far - annoyingly vague contract. “There
just wasn’t time to explain why we were sending him with you to Kazakhstan,”
she added.

“So explain now.” He was pacing
in the grass in front of the best hotel his IAEA stipend could afford. It was
evening and the crickets were waking up; to the west, fantastically huge clouds
had piled up, their tops still lit golden as the rest of the sky faded into mauve.
It was cooling off already.

“Right... Well, first of all, it
seems he really is being chased by the Russians, but not by the country. It’s
the
Soviet Union Online
that’s after him. And the
only place their IP addresses are blocked is inside the geographical
territories of the Russian and Kazakhstani Republics.”

“So, let me get this straight,”
said Gennady heavily. “Poor Ambrose is being chased by Soviet agents. He ran to
the U.N. rather than the FBI, and to keep him safe you decided to transport him
to the one place in the world that is free of Soviet influence. Which is
Russia.”

“Exactly,” said Frankl brightly. “And
you’re escorting him because your contract is taking you there anyway. No other
reason.”

“No, no, it’s fine. Just tell me
what the hell I’m supposed to be looking for at SNOPB. The place was a
God-damned anthrax factory. I’m a radiation specialist.”

He heard Frankl take a deep
breath, and then she said, “Two years ago, an unknown person or persons hacked
into a Los Alamos server and stole the formula for an experimental metastable
explosive. Now we have a paper trail and emails that have convinced us that a
metastable bomb is being built. You know what this means?”

Gennady leaned against the wall
of the hotel, suddenly feeling sick. “The genie is finally out of the bottle.”

“If it’s true, Gennady, then
everything we’ve worked for has come to naught. Because as of now, anybody in
the world who wants a nuclear bomb, can make one.”

He didn’t know what to say, so he
just stared out at the steppe, thinking about a world where hydrogen bombs were
as easy to get as TNT. His whole life’s work would be rendered pointless - and
all arms treaties, the painstaking work of generations to put the nuclear genie
back in its bottle. The nuclear threat had been containable when it was limited
to governments and terrorists, but now the threat was from
everybody
...

Eleanor’s distant voice snapped
him back to attention. “Here’s the thing, Gennady: we don’t know very much
about this group that’s building the metastable weapon. By luck we’ve managed
to decrypt a few emails from one party, so we know a tiny bit - a minimal bit -
about the design of the bomb. It seems to be based on one of the biggest of the
weapons ever tested at Semipalatinsk - its code name was the
Tsarina
.”

“The
Tsarina
?”
Gennady whistled softly. “That was a major, major test. Underground, done in
1968. Ten megatonnes; lifted the whole prairie two meters and dropped it.
Killed about a thousand cattle from the ground shock. Scared the hell out of
the Americans, too.”

“Yes, and we’ve discovered that
some of the
Tsarina’
s components were made at the
Stepnogorsk Scientific Experimental and Production Base. In Building 242.”

“But SNOPB was a biological
facility, not nuclear. How can this possibly be connected?”

“We don’t know how, yet. Listen,
Gennady, I know it’s a thin lead. After you’re done at the SNOPB, I want you to
drive out to Semipalatinsk and investigate the
Tsarina
site.”

“Hmmph.” Part of Gennady was
deeply annoyed. Part was relieved that he wouldn’t be dealing with any IAEA or
Russian nuclear staff in the near future. Truth to tell, stalking around the
Kazaks grasslands was a lot more appealing than dealing with the political
shit-storm that would hit when this all went public.

But speaking of people... He
glanced up at the hotel’s one lighted window. With a grimace he pocketed his
augmented reality glasses and went up to the room.

Ambrose was sprawled on one of
the narrow beds. He had the TV on and was watching a Siberian ski-adventure
infomercial. “Well?” he said as Gennady sat on the other bed and dragged his
shoes off.

“Tour of secret Soviet anthrax
factory. Tomorrow, after egg McMuffins.”

“Yay,” said Ambrose with apparent
feeling. “Do I get to wear a hazmat suit?”

“Not this time.” Gennady lay
back, then saw that Ambrose was staring at him with an alarmed look on his
face. “Is fine,” he said, waggling one hand at the boy. “Only one underground
bunker we’re interested in, and they probably never used it. The place never
went into full production, you know.”

“Meaning it only made a few
hundred pounds of anthrax per day instead of the full ton it was designed for!
I should feel reassured?”

Gennady stared at the uneven
ceiling. “Is an adventure.” He must be tired, his English was slipping.

“This sucks.” Ambrose crossed his
arms and glowered at the TV.

Gennady thought for a while. “So
what did you do to piss off Google so much? Drive the rover off a cliff?”
Ambrose didn’t answer, and Gennady sat up. “You found something. On Mars.”

“No that’s ridiculous,” said
Ambrose. “That’s not it at all.”

“Huh.” Gennady lay down again. “Still,
I think I’d enjoy it. Even if it wasn’t in real-time... driving on Mars. That
would be cool.”

“That sucked too.”

“Really? I would have thought it
would be fun, seeing all those places emerge from low-res satellite into full
hi-res three-d.”

But Ambrose shook his head. “That’s
not how it worked. That’s the point. I couldn’t believe my luck when I won the
contest, you know? I thought it’d be like being the first man on Mars, only I
wouldn’t have to leave my living room. But the whole point of the rover was to
go into terrain that hadn’t been photographed from the ground before. And with
the time-delay on signals to Mars, I wasn’t steering it in real time. I’d drive
in fast-forward mode over low-res pink hills that looked worse than a
forty-year-old video game, then upload the drive sequence and log off. The
rover’d get the commands twenty minutes later and drive overnight, then
download the results. By that time it was the next day and I had to enter the
next path. Rarely had time to even look at where we’d actually gone the day
before.”

Gennady considered. “A bit
disappointing. But still, more than most people ever get.”

“More than anyone else will ever
get.” Ambrose scowled. “That’s what was so awful about it. You wouldn’t
understand.”