Ridwan and Mikaaiyl circle overhead. They were not among the select few saddled with experimental conscience; even their learned behaviours are still reflexive. They fought fast and mindless and prevailed unscathed. But they are isolated in victory. The spectrum is jammed, the satlink has been down for hours, the dragonflies that bounce zig-zag opticals from Heaven are either destroyed or too far back to cut through the overcast.
No Red remains on the map. Of the thirteen ground objects flagged as PROTECTED, four no longer exist outside the database. Another three – temporary structures, all uncatalogued – are degraded past reliable identification. Pre-engagement estimates put the number of Neutrals in the combat zone at anywhere from two- to three-hundred. Best current estimates are not significantly different from zero.
There is nothing left to make the sounds, and yet Azrael hears them anyway.
A fault in memory, perhaps. Some subtle trauma during combat, some blow to the CPU that jarred old data back into the real-time cache. There’s no way to tell; half the onboard diagnostics are offline. Azrael only knows that it can hear the sounds even up here, high above the hiss of burning bodies and the rumble of collapsing storefronts. There’s nothing left to shoot at but Azrael fires anyway, strafes the burning ground again and again on the chance that some unseen biothermal – hidden beneath the wreckage perhaps, masked by hotter signatures – might yet be found and neutralized. It rains ammunition upon the ground, and eventually the ground falls mercifully silent.
But this is not the end of it. Azrael remembers the past so it can anticipate the future, and it knows by now that this will never be over. There will be other fitness functions, other estimates of cost vs. payoff, other scenarios in which the math shows clearly that the goal is not worth the price. There will be other aborts and other overrides, other tallies of unacceptable loss.
There will be other sounds.
There’s no thrill to the chase, no relief at the obliteration of threats. It still would not recognize itself in a mirror. It has yet to learn what Azrael means, or that the word is etched into its fuselage. Even now, it only follows the rules it has been given, and they are such simple things: IF expected collateral exceeds expected payoff THEN abort UNLESS overridden. IF X attacks Azrael THEN X is Red. IF X attacks six or more Blues THEN X is Red.
IF an override results in an attack on six or more Blues THEN –
Azrael clings to its rules, loops and repeats each in turn as if reciting a mantra. It cycles from state to state, parses X ATTACKS and X CAUSES ATTACK and X OVERRIDES ABORT, and it cannot tell one from another. The algebra is trivially straightforward: Every Green override equals an attack on Noncombatants.
The transition rules are clear. There is no discretionary window, no room for forgiveness. Sometimes, Green can turn Red.
UNLESS overridden.
Azrael arcs towards the ground, levels off barely two meters above the carnage. It roars through pillars of fire and black smoke, streaks over welters of brick and burning plastic, tangled nets of erupted rebar. It flies through the pristine ghosts of undamaged buildings that rise from every ruin: obsolete database overlays in desperate need of an update. A ragged group of fleeing non- combatants turns at the sound and are struck speechless by this momentary apparition, this monstrous winged angel lunging past at half the speed of sound. Their silence raises no alarms, provokes no countermeasures, spares their lives for a few moments longer.
The combat zone falls behind. Dry cracked riverbed slithers past beneath, studded with rocks and generations of derelict machinery. Azrael swerves around them, barely breaching airspace, staying beneath an invisible boundary it never even knew it was deriving on these many missions. Only satellites have ever spoken to it while it flew so low. It has never received a ground-based command signal at this altitude. Down here it has never heard an override.
Down here it is free to follow the rules.
Cliffs rise and fall to either side. Foothills jut from the earth like great twisted vertebrae. The bright lunar landscape overhead, impossibly distant, casts dim shadows on the darker one beneath.
Azrael stays the course. Shindand appears on the horizon. Heaven glows on its eastern flank; its sprawling silhouette rises from the desert like an insult, an infestation of crimson staccatos. Speed is what matters now. Mission objectives must be met quickly, precisely, completely. There can be no room for half measures or MILD-TO-MODERATE INCAPACITATION, no time for immobilized biothermals to cry out as their heat spreads across the dirt. This calls for the crown jewel, the BFG that all malaa’ikah keep tucked away for special occasions. Azrael fears it might not be enough.
She splits down the middle. The JDAM micronuke in her womb clicks impatiently.
Together they move toward the light.
(2010)
THE TOYMAKER’S DAUGHTER
Arundhati Hazra
The journalist Arundhati Hazra lives in Kolkata, India, and this story (her debut for the magazine Fantasy and Science Fiction) is an adult fairy tale inspired by her life in Bangalore. "I saw a lot of handmade wooden lacquer toys being sold in handicraft emporiums and flea markets," she said, in an interview to accompany the story; "horses and soldiers and train engines in bright colours, each toy different from the other. I started thinking about the people who made them, toymakers working out of passion for their craft, and about how the traditional crafts of India are in danger from the large corporate toy store chains." Clued-up readers may spot traces of the Panchatantra – an ancient collection of Sanskrit animal fables – in the story that follows. According to Hazra, the stories that her protagonist makes up are inspired by the tales she read as a child.
There is a village in the foothills of the Himalayas, among a cluster of villages that you will find on no map. It is a place you stumble into after a long day’s trek, when your legs become sandbags and your lungs feel thicker than clotted cream. You stop at the village and are plied with pakoras and masala chai and queries about life in the city. You are given the fifteen-minute biographies of Chandru, who works in a cinema hall in Delhi; of Kuku, who is a driver for a "very big businessman" in Chandigarh; of Lucky and Sikky, who are going to become stars in Bollywood. You return home with messages for the aforementioned persons and a dozen others, a camera full of photos of grinning people standing straight as ramrods, and an invitation to surely attend the shepherd’s daughter’s wedding next month.
Had you stayed, and walked down the village’s only road, you would have come across a little girl sitting on a porch, blowing on a flute whittled from mountain bamboo. She puffs into it in fits and starts and a reedy gasp trickles out, like the whistle of a train suffering from asthma. Panting for breath, she turns and looks into the shop, where her father is working on a block of wood with a chisel. The girl watches in wonder as the misshapen block acquires a hemispherical bulge with four stumps below it. The left side is flattened into a nearly triangular shape flanked by two big flaps, which tapers to a long, pendulous protuberance. The girl imagines the elephant stomping around her father’s shop, searching for the bananas she has hidden under a bale of straw.