War & Space: Recent Combat

by Ken MacLeod

  The beam wavered and went dark.

  BABYLON CITY 2:78 233” S:2 54” / 34822.10.6 5:18:4

  Record of police interrogation, Suspect 34822.10.6.502155, alias Ajabeli Huzalatum Taraämapsu, alias Liburnadisha Iliawilimrabi Apsuümasha, alias ‘Black’. Charges: subversion, terrorism, falsification of temple records, failure to register as a foreign agent. Interrogator is Detective (Second Degree) Nabûnaïd Babilisheïr Rabisila.

  Rabisila: Your people are gone. Your weapon’s been destroyed. You might as well tell us everything.

  Suspect: It accomplished its purpose.

  Rabisila: Which was?

  Suspect: To give you hope.

  Rabisila: What do you mean, “hope”?

  Suspect: Men are fighting gods now, in Gish and Sippar.

  Rabisila: A few criminal lunatics. Lord Anshar will

  destroy them.

  Suspect: Do you think they’ll be the last? Two of your gods are dead. Dead at the hands of mortals. Nothing Anshar’s soldiers do to Sippar will change that. Nothing you do to me.

  Rabisila: You’re insane.

  Suspect: I mean it. One day—not in my lifetime, certainly not

  in yours, but one day—one day you’ll all be free.

  7. A soldier of the city

  A ship found Ish a few months later: a ship called Upekkhâ, from a single-system nomad civilization based some seventeen light-years from Babylon and known to itself as the Congregation. The ship, the name of which meant ‘equanimity’, was an antimatter-fueled ion rocket, a quarter of a league long and twice that in diameter; it could reach two-tenths the speed of light, but only very, very slowly. It had spent fifteen years docked at Babylon-Borsippa, and, having been launched some four months before the attack on the Corn Parade, was now on its way back to the star the Congregation called Mettâ. The star’s name, in the ancient liturgical language of the monks and nuns of the Congregation, meant ‘kindness’.

  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, Arrakhasampada, 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?” Arrakhasampada 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 Dr. Sam—his name, which Ish couldn’t pronounce, meant something like ‘the one who leads a balanced life’—prounounced Ish fit to move out of the infirmary. Arrakhasampada and Dr. Sam helped Ish decorate his cabin, picking out plants from the garden and furnishings from Upekkhâ’s sparse catalog 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.

  Arrakhasampada asked about the mended icon in its block of resin, and Ish tried to explain.

  She and Dr. 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. Arrakhasampada was carrying a bag of oranges, and Dr. 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 Dr. 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?” Arrakhasampada asked.

  About the Contributors

  Ken MacLeod was born in Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, Scotland, on August 2, 1954. He is married with two grown-up children and lives in West Lothian. He has an Honours and Masters degree in biological subjects and worked for some years in the IT industry. Since 1997 he has been a full-time writer, and in 2009 was Writer in Residence at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum at Edinburgh University. He is the author of thirteen novels, from The Star Fraction to Intrusion, and many articles and short stories. His novels and stories have received three BSFA awards and three Prometheus Awards, and several have been short-listed for the Clarke and Hugo Awards. Ken MacLeod’s blog is The Early Days of a Better Nation: kenmacleod.blogspot.com. His twitter feed is: @amendlocke

  Suzanne Palmer is a writer and artist who lives in western Massachusetts. In keeping up with current SF author trends, she has
chosen “twins” as the most efficient means of distraction from writing, but sometimes they fall asleep and words happen anyway. Her stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Interzone, and Black Static.

  Charles Oberndorf is a graduate of Clarion East. He’s the author of three novels and five stories, all science fiction. He teaches English at University School in Cleveland, Ohio where he lives with his wife and son. He’s written book reviews for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the New York Review of Science Fiction. He’s currently working on a thematic sequel to “Another Life” as well as a biographical novel about an American veteran of the Spanish Civil War.

  Yoon Ha Lee lives in Louisiana with her family, but has not yet been eaten by alligators. Her fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. This story was inspired by Admiral Yi Sun-Shin’s victories in the Imjin War, although it is probably not possible to improve on.

  Alastair Reynolds was born in Barry in 1966. He spent his early years in Cornwall, then returned to Wales for his primary and secondary school education. He completed a degree in astronomy at Newcastle, then a PhD in the same subject at St Andrews in Scotland. He left the UK in 1991 and spent the next sixteen years working in the Netherlands, mostly for the European Space Agency, although he also did a stint as a postdoctoral worker in Utrecht. He had been writing and selling science fiction since 1989, and published his first novel, Revelation Space, in 2000. He has recently completed his tenth novel and has continued to publish short fiction. His novel Chasm City won the British Science Fiction Award, and he has been shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke award three times. In 2004 he left scientific research to write full time. He married in 2005 and returned to Wales in 2008, where he lives in Rhondda Cynon Taff.

  Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton Award, the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award. She has been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, and Spectrum Awards, the Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 2007 and 2009. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, and an enormous cat.

  Robert Reed is the author of several novels and a small empire of short fiction. His novella, “A Billion Eves” won the Hugo. Reed lives in Lincoln, NE with his wife and daughter, and his new best friend, a NOOK Tablet.

  Sandra McDonald is the author of the recent gender-bending collection Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories and the novels The Outback Stars, The Stars Down Under, and The Stars Blue Yonder. Her short fiction has appeared in more than thirty national, small press and online magazines. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and teaches college in Jacksonville, Florida. Visit her at www. sandramcdonald. com

  Adam-Troy Castro’s seventeen books include Emissaries from the Dead (winner of the Philip K. Dick award), and The Third Claw of God, both of which feature his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator, Andrea Cort. His next books will be a series of middle-school novels about the adventures of a strange young boy called Gustav Gloom, the first of which will be Gustav Gloom and the People Taker, due out from Grossett and Dunlap in August 2012. His short fiction has been nominated for five Nebulas, two Hugos, and two Stokers. Adam-Troy, who describes the odd hyphen between his first and middle names as a typo from his college newspaper that was just annoying enough to embrace with gusto, lives in Miami with his wife Judi and a population of insane cats that includes Uma Furman and Meow Farrow.

  Beth Bernobich is a writer, reader, mother, and geek. Her short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Interzone, and Strange Horizons, among other places. Her first fantasy novel, Passion Play, appeared from Tor Books in 2010, with three more to follow in the series. She currently lives in Connecticut with her husband and two idiosyncratic cats.

  Tom Purdom’s contributions to the science fiction field include novels, short fiction, magazine articles, book reviews, and an anthology of science writing by leading science fiction writers. He started reading science fiction in 1950, when it was just emerging from the pulp ghetto, and sold his first story in 1957, just before he turned twenty-one. In the last two decades, he has produced a string of novelettes and short stories that has appeared in Asimov’s and anthologies such as the best of the year books edited by David Hartwell and Gardner Dozois. Outside of science fiction, his literary output includes magazine articles, essays, science writing, brochures on home decorating, an educational comic book on vocational safety, and twenty-five years of classical music criticism. He lives in downtown Philadelphia where he devotes himself to a continuous round of pleasures and entertainments.

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch is a bestselling writer in the United States and Europe. She has won the Hugo award twice, the World Fantasy Award, and several readers choice awards in both mystery and science fiction. She also writes under half a dozen pen names in a variety of genres. To find out more about her work, go to www.kristinekathrynrusch.com

  Geoffrey A. Landis is a physicist who works at the NASA John Glenn Research Center on developing advanced technologies for human and robotic space exploration. He is also a Hugo- and Nebula- award winning science fiction writer; the author of the novel Mars Crossing, the short-story collection Impact Parameter and Other Quantum Realities, and more than eighty short stories, which have appeared in places including Analog, Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and numerous best-of-the-year volumes. Most recently, his poem “Search” won the 2009 Rhysling award for best science-fiction poem, and his poetry collection Iron Angels appeared from Van Zeno in 2009. His most recent story, “Sultan of the Clouds,” appears in the September 2010 issue of Asimov’s.

  Nancy Kress is the author of thirty books, including fantasy and SF novels, four collections of short stories, and three books on writing. She is perhaps best known for the “Sleepless” trilogy that began with Beggars in Spain. Her work has won four Nebulas, two Hugos, a Sturgeon, and the John W. Campbell Award. Most recent books are a collection, Fountain of Age and Other Stories, a YA fantasy written under the name Anna Kendall, Crossing Over; and a short novel of eco-terror, Before the Fall, During the Fall, After the Fall. Kress lives in Seattle with her husband, SF writer Jack Skillingstead, and Cosette, the world’s most spoiled toy poodle.

  Alan DeNiro is the author of Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead, a story collection from Small Beer Press; and Total Oblivion, More or Less, a novel from Spectra. Stories set in the same world as “Have You Any Wool” have appeared or are forthcoming in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and Talebones.

  Genevieve Valentine’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Apex, and in the anthologies The Living Dead 2, Running with the Pack, Teeth, and more. Her nonfiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Tor.com, and Fantasy Magazine, and she is the co-author of Geek Wisdom. Her first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, has won the 2012 Crawford Award. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog, genevievevalentine.com.

  Paul McAuley is the author of more than twenty books, including science-fiction, thriller, and crime novels, three collections of short stories, a Doctor Who novella, and an anthology of stories about popular music, which he co-edited with Kim Newman. His fiction has won the Philip K Dick Memorial Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W Campbell Award, and the Sidewise and British Fantasy Awards. After working as a research biologist and university lecturer, he is now a full-time writer. He lives in North London.

  Charles Coleman Finlay is the author of four novels and more than forty stories, some of which have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, Sidewise, and Sturgeon Awards. He is married to novelist Rae Carson; they live in Ohio with their two sons and an endless supply of story ideas. Hi
s website is www.ccfinlay.com.

  Cat Rambo lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest. Her one hundred plus published stories include appearances in Asimov’s, Weird Tales, and Tor.com. Links to her fiction and more information can be found at www.kittywumpus.net

  David Moles 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.

  Publication History

  “Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359?” by Ken MacLeod. © 2007 by Ken MacLeod. Originally published in The New Space Opera.

  “Surf” by Suzanne Palmer. © 2011 by Suzanne Palmer. Originally published in Asimov’s.

  “Another Life” by Charles Oberndorf. © 2009 by Charles Oberndorf. Originally published in F&SF.

  “Between Two Dragons” by Yoon Ha Lee. © 2010 by Yoon Ha Lee. Originally published in Clarkesworld.

  “Scales” by Alastair Reynolds. © 2009 by Alastair Reynolds. Originally published as a podcast for The Guardian and first in print in Lightspeed.

  “Golubash, or Wine-Blood-War-Elegy” by Catherynne M. Valente. © 2009 by Catherynne M. Valente. Originally published in Federations.

  “Leave” by Robert Reed. © 2008 by Robert Reed. Originally published in F&SF.

  “Mehra and Jiun” by Sandra McDonald. © 2012 by Sandra McDonald. Original to this volume.

  “Her Husband’s Hands” by Adam-Troy Castro. © 2011 by Adam-Troy Castro. Originally published in Lightspeed.

  “Remembrance” by Beth Bernobich. © 2006 by Beth Bernobich. Originally published in Sex in the System.

  “Palace Resolution” by Tom Purdom. © 2004 by Tom Purdom. Originally published in Microcosms.