The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (19 page)

POINTLESS REVENGE MISSION
LYNCHINGS IN BABYLON: IMMIGRANTS TARGETED
SIPPAR RISES UP

—headlines, radical newspaper
Iïnshushaqiï,
Babylon City

THEY CAN DIE

—graffiti common in working-class and slave districts after the nomad attack on Isin

III

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 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.

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 duffel.

“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 gray 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 duffel 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.

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.

IV

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 armor 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, fueled, 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.