Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson

Author:Kelly Robson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

-12-

SUSA’S PEOPLE RANGED THROUGH the kingdom, gathering insects and worms and closing them into containers. Then, Susa seized land. With no explanation, she canceled the leases on a wide strip of fields between two arms of the river and cleared everyone off it, leaving the crops to wave in the wind untended. Susa stacked the land with tribute—that was the only word for it. An array of temple furnishings, mirrors, caskets, and gems, all gathered inside her own traveling tent.

Susa’s instructions were clear. No one was allowed to visit those fields without her permission. But Shulgi was king. He didn’t have to ask permission of anyone but the gods.

He called in his falconers and brought them to council among his wives in one of the palace’s lowest and darkest storerooms. The falconers all agreed: They were being watched—everyone was being watched. Not only by the red-eyed silver things and the hollow hornets but by unseen creatures from above. Perhaps by the new stars themselves.

Shulgi believed his falconers. It took a watcher to recognize another watcher.

Against an unknown enemy, only one strategy would succeed: stealth.

* * *

When the main satellites began posting tomography and topography data, Minh glued herself to the feed. On the other side of the globe, Mesopotamia was still dark; true-color remote sensing would have to wait for daylight. The rivers came up in wireframe first as the geographical survey began a preliminary pass. When the details started filling in, she drilled deep into the data, spreading the terrain around her until she could hang right over the narrowest point of the interfluve.

She anchored her view to an imaginary point a hundred meters above the ground, where she could see both rivers on either side. Below, the tomography registered a mud brick city in three-dimensional detail, cubes hardly less dense than the surrounding terrain, the geography distorted by roads, paddocks, shacks, fences, paths, berms, walls, pits—an unending array of meaningless complications. A tangle of human-made data anomalies messing up her geophysical overview.

When she excluded right angles from the synthesis, most of the anomalies flattened out. Now she could see the landscape in its pure form, with no human interference. No sound, no color, no texture detail, but the two rivers were within her grasp.

Minh lifted her perspective to a thousand meters, two thousand. Now the whole trench spread below her. The Tigris and Euphrates in full spring flow, fed generously at their sources with freshet from the snow-covered mountains to the north, and further swollen by tributaries snaking down from the surrounding highlands. Their channels braided the plain, pulling away from the main lobe formed millennia in the past, its paleochannel buried deep in the geological strata, and now forming new lobes—the complex web of a mature river system.

The Tigris was the newest major channel. Since splitting away from the Euphrates hundreds of years in the past, the Tigris now rushed to the ocean, depositing its suspended sediment to rapidly infill the shallow upper gulf and form a new wide delta, stranding the old salt marsh far from shore.

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