Singularity Sky (17 page)

‘Jubilee’, if that makes any sense to you. Everything … stops. And the Festival takes over the day-today running of the system for the duration.”

She looked at Bauer. “Is that what you wanted to know?”

Bauer shook his head, looking displeased. “No it wasn’t,” he said. “I was after capabilities.”

Rachel shrugged. “We don’t know,” she said bluntly. “As I said, we’ve never seen it from close-up.”

Bauer frowned. “Then this will be a first for you, won’t it? Which leads us to the next issue, updates to navigation plan Delta …”

A few hours later, Rachel lay facedown on her bunk and tried to shut the world out of her head. It wasn’t easy; too much of the world had followed her home over the years, crying for attention.

She was still alive. She knew, somehow, that she should feel relieved about this, but what she’d seen in the briefing room screen had unnerved her more than she was willing to admit. The admiral was a senile vacuum at the heart of the enterprise. The intelligence staff were well-meaning, but profoundly ignorant: they were so inflexible that they were incapable of doing their job properly. She’d tried to explain how advanced civilizations worked until she could feel herself turning blue in the face, and they still didn’t understand! They’d nodded politely, because she was a lady—even if a somewhat scandalous one, a lady diplomat—and immediately forgotten or ignored her advice.

You don’t fight an infowar attack with missiles and lasers, any more than you attack a railway locomotive with spears and stone axes. You don’t fight a replicator attack by throwing energy and matter at machines that will just use them for fuel. They’d nodded approvingly and gone on to discuss the virtues of active countermeasures versus low-observability systems. And they still didn’t get it; it was as if the very idea of something like the Festival, or even the Septagon system, occupied a mental blind spot ubiquitous in their civilization. They could accept a woman in trousers, even in a colonel’s uniform, far more easily than they could cope with the idea of a technological singularity.

Back on Earth, she had attended a seminar, years ago. It had been a weeklong gathering of experts; hermeneutic engineers driven mad by studying the arcane debris of the Singularity, demographers still trying to puzzle out the distribution of colony worlds, a couple of tight-lipped mercenary commanders and commercial intelligence consultants absorbed in long-range backstop insurance against a return of the Eschaton. They were all thrown together and mixed with a coterie of Defense SIG experts and UN diplomats. It was hosted by the UN, which, as the sole remaining island of concrete stability in a sea of pocket polities, was the only body able to host such a global event.

During the seminar, she had attended a cocktail party on a balcony of white concrete, jutting from a huge hotel built on the edge of the UN city, Geneva.

She’d been in uniform at the time, working as an auditor for the denuclearization commission. Black suit, white gloves, mirrorshades pulsing news updates and radiation readings into her raw and tired eyes.

Hyped up on a cocktail of alcohol antagonists, she sipped a bitter (and ineffective) gin with a polite Belgian cosmologist. Mutual incomprehension tinged with apprehension bound them in an uncomfortable Ping-Pong match of a conversation. “There is so much we do not understand about the Eschaton,” the cosmologist had insisted, “especially concerning its interaction with the birth of the universe. The big bang.” He raised his eyebrows suggestively.

“The big bang. Not, by any chance, an unscheduled fissile criticality excursion, was it?” She said it deadpan, trying to deflect him with humor.

“Hardly. There were no licensing bodies in those days—at the start of space-time, before the era of expansion and the first appearance of mass and energy, about a billionth of a billionth of a millionth of a second into the life of the universe.”

“Surely the Eschaton can’t have been responsible for that. It’s a modern phenomenon, isn’t it?”

“Maybe not responsible,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “But maybe circumstances arising then formed a necessary precondition for the Eschaton’s existence, or the existence of something related to but beyond the Eschaton. There’s a whole school of cosmology predicated around the weak anthropic principle, that the universe is as it seems because, if it was any other way, we would not exist to observe it. There is a … less popular field, based on the strong anthropic principle, that the universe exists to give rise to certain types of entity. I don’t believe we’ll ever understand the Eschaton until we understand why the universe exists.”

She smiled at him toothily, and let a Prussian diplomat rescue her with the aid of a polite bow and an offer to explain the fall of Warsaw during the late unpleasantness in the Baltic. A year or so later, the polite cosmologist had been murdered by Algerian religious fundamentalists who thought his account of the universe a blasphemy against the words of the prophet Yusuf Smith as inscribed on his two tablets of gold. But that was typical of Europe, half-empty and prey to what the formerly Islamic world had become.

Somewhere along the line she, too, had changed. She’d spent decades—the best part of her second, early-twenty-second-century life—fighting the evils of nuclear proliferation. Starting out as a dreadlocked direct-action activist, chaining herself to fences, secure in the naive youthful belief that no harm could befall her. Later, she’d figured out that the way to do it was wearing a smart suit, with mercenary soldiers and the threat of canceled insurance policies backing up her quiet voice. Still prickly and direct, but less of a knee-jerk nonconformist, she’d learned to work the system for maximum effect. The hydra seemed halfway under control, bombings down to only one every couple of years, when Bertil had summoned her to Geneva and offered her a new job. Then she’d wished she’d paid more attention to the cosmologist—for the Algerian Latter-Day Saints had been very thorough in their suppression of the Tiplerite heresy—but it was too late, and in any event, the minutiae of the Standing Committee’s investigations into chronological and probabilistic warfare beckoned.

Somewhere along the line, the idealist had butted heads with the pragmatist, and the pragmatist won. Maybe the seeds had been sown during her first marriage. Maybe it had come later; being shot in the back and spending six months recovering in hospital in Calcutta had changed her. She’d done her share of shooting, too, or at least directing the machinery of preemptive vengeance, wiping out more than one cell of atomic-empowered fanatics—whether central-Asian independence fighters, freelance meres with a bomb too many in their basement, or on one notable occasion, radical pro-lifers willing to go to any lengths to protect the unborn child. Idealism couldn’t coexist with so many other people’s ideals, betrayed in their execution by the tools they’d chosen. She’d walked through Manchester three days after the Inter-City Firm’s final kickoff, before the rain had swept the sad mounds of cinders and bone from the blasted streets. She’d become so cynical that only a complete change of agenda, a wide-angle view of the prospects for humanity, could help her retain her self-respect.

And so to the New Republic. A shithole of a backwater, in her frank opinion; in need of remodeling by any means necessary, lest it pollute its more enlightened neighboring principalities, like Malacia or Turku. But the natives were still people—and for all that they tampered with the machineries of mass destruction in apparent ignorance of their power, they deserved better than they’d receive from an awakened and angry Eschaton. They deserved better than to be left to butt heads with something they didn’t understand, like the Festival, whatever it was: if they couldn’t understand it, then maybe she’d have to think the unthinkable for them, help them to reach some kind of accommodation with it—if that was possible. The alarming aspect to the UN’s knowledge of the Festival—the only thing she hadn’t told Bauer about—was that antitech colonies contacted by it disappeared, leaving only wreckage behind when the Festival moved on.

Just why this might be she didn’t know, but it didn’t bode well for the future.

Nothing quite concentrates a man’s mind like the knowledge that he is to be hanged in four weeks; unless it is possibly the knowledge that he has sabotaged the very ship he sails in, and he—along with everyone else in it—will be hanged in three months. For while the execution may be farther away, the chances of a reprieve are infinitely lower.

Martin Springfield sat in the almost-deserted wardroom, a glass of tea at his hand, staring absently at the ceiling beams. A nautical theme pervaded the room; old oak panels walled it in, and the wooden plank floor had been holystone-polished until it gleamed. A silver-chased samovar sat steaming gently atop an age-blackened chest beneath a huge gilt-framed oil painting of the ship’s namesake that hung on one wall. Lord Vanek leading the cavalry charge at the suppression of the Robots’ Rebellion 160 years ago—destroying the aspirations of those citizens who had dreamed of life without drudge-labor in the service of aristocrats. Martin shivered slightly, trying to grapple with his personal demons.

It’s all my fault, he thought. And there’s nobody else to share it with.

Comfortless fate. He sipped at his glass, felt the acrid sweet bite of the rum underlying the bitterness of the tea. His lips felt numb, now. Stupid, he thought. It was too late to undo things. Too late to confess, even to Rachel, to try to get her out of this trap. He should have told her right at the beginning, before she came on board. Kept her out of the way of the Eschaton’s revenge. Now, even if he confessed everything, or had done so before they tripped the patch in the drive kernel controllers, it would only put him on a one-way trip to the death chair. And although the sabotage was essential, and even though it wouldn’t kill anyone directly—

Martin shuddered, drained the glass, and put it down beside his chair. He hunched forward unconsciously, neck bowed beneath the weight of a guilty conscience. At least I did the right thing, he tried to tell himself. None of us are going home, but at least the homes we had will still be there when we’re gone. Including Rachel’s unlived-in apartment. He winced. It was next to impossible to feel guilt for a fleet, but just knowing about her presence aboard the ship had kept him awake all night.

The mournful pipes had summoned the ship to battle stations almost an hour ago. Something to do with an oncoming Septagonese carrier battle group, scrambled like a nest of angry hornets in response to the fiasco with the mining tugs. It didn’t make any difference to Martin. Somewhere in the drive control network, an atomic clock was running slow, tweaked by a folded curl of space-time from the drive kernel. It was only a small error, of course, but CP violation would amplify it out of all proportion when the fleet began its backward path through space-time. He’d done it deliberately, to prevent a catastrophic and irrevocable disaster. The New Republican Navy might think a closed timelike loop to be only a petty tactical maneuver, but it was the thin end of a wedge; a wedge that Herman said had to be held at bay. He’d made his pact with a darker, more obscure agency than Rachel’s.

From his perspective, the UN DISA people merely aped his employer’s actions on a smaller scale—in hope of pre-empting them.

Good-bye, Belinda, he thought, mentally consigning his sister to oblivion.

Good-bye, London. Dust of ages ate the metropolis, crumbled its towers in dust. Hello, Herman, to the steady tick of the pendulum clock on the wall.

As the flagship, Lord Vanek provided a time signal for the other vessels in the fleet. Not just that; it provided an inertial reference frame locked to the space-time coordinates of their first jump. By slightly slowing the clock, Martin had ensured that the backward time component of their maneuver would be botched very slightly.

The fleet would travel forward into the light cone, maybe as much as four thousand years; it would rewind, back almost the whole distance—but not quite as far as it had come. Their arrival at Rochard’s World would be delayed almost two weeks, about as long as a rapid crossing without any of the closed timelike hanky-panky the Admiralty had planned. And then the Festival would—well, what the Festival would do to the fleet was the Festival’s business. All he knew was that he, and everyone else, would pay the price.

Who did they think they were kidding, anyway? Claiming they planned to use the maneuver just to reduce transit time, indeed! Even a toddler could see through a subterfuge that transparent, all the way to the sealed orders waiting in the admiral’s safe. You can‘t fool the Eschaton by lying to yourself. Maybe Herman, or rather the being that hid behind that code name, would be waiting. Maybe Martin would be able to get off the doomed ship, maybe Rachel would, or maybe through a twist of fate the New Republican Navy would defeat the Festival in a head-to-head fight. And maybe he’d teach the horse to sing …

He stood up, a trifle giddily, and carried his glass to the samovar. He half filled it, then topped it up from the cut-glass decanter until the nostril-prickling smell began to waft over the steam. He sat down in his chair a bit too hard, numb fingertips and lips threatening to betray him. With nothing to do but avoid his guilt by drinking himself into a paralytic stupor, Martin was taking the easy way out.

Presently, he drifted back to more tolerable memories. Eighteen years earlier, when he was newly married and working as a journeyman field circus engineer, a gray cipher of a man had approached him in a bar somewhere in orbit over Wollstonecroft’s World. “Can I buy you a drink?”

asked the man, whose costume was somewhere between that of an accountant and a lawyer. Martin had nodded. “You’re Martin Springfield,”

the man had said. “You work at present for Nakamichi Nuclear, where you are making relatively little money and running up a sizable overdraft. My sponsors have asked me to approach you with a job offer.”

“Answer’s no,” Martin had said automatically. He had made up his mind some time before that the experience he was gaining at NN was more useful than an extra thousand euros a year; and besides, his employing combine was paranoid enough about some of its contracts to sound out its contractor’s loyalties with fake approaches.