Singularity Sky (21 page)

But change and control brought a price that Rubenstein was finding increasingly unpalatable. Not that he could see any alternatives, but the people were accustomed to being shepherded by father church and the benign dictatorship of the little father, Duke Politovsky. The habits of a dozen lifetimes could not be broken overnight, and to make an omelet it was first necessary to crack some eggshells.

Burya had a fatal flaw; he was not a violent man. He resented and hated the circumstances that forced him to sign arrest warrants and compulsory upload orders; the revolution he had spent so long imagining was a glorious thing, unsullied by brute violence, and the real world—with its recalcitrant monarchist teachers and pigheaded priests—was a grave disappointment to him. The more he was forced to corrupt his ideals, the more he ached inside, and the more it grieved him, the more he hated the people who forced him to such hideous, bloody extremity of action—until they, in turn, became grist for the machinery of revolution, and subsequently bar stock for the scalpel blades that prodded his conscience and kept him awake long into the night, planning the next wave of purges and forcible uploads.

He was deep in his work, oblivious to the outside world, depressed and making himself more so by doing the job that he had always wanted to do but never realized would be this awful—when a voice spoke to him.

“Burya Rubenstein.”

“What!” He looked up, almost guiltily, like a small boy discovered goofing off in class by a particularly stern teacher.

‘Talk. We. Must.“ The thing sitting in the chair opposite him was so nightmarish that he blinked several times before he could make his eyes focus on it. It was hairless and pink and larger-than-human-sized, with stubby legs and paws and little pink eyes—and four huge, yellowing tusks, like the incisors of a rat the size of an elephant. The eyes stared at him with disquieting intelligence as it manipulated an odd pouch molded from the belt that was its only garment. ”You talk. To me.“

Burya adjusted his pince-nez and squinted at the thing. “Who are you and how did you get in here?” he asked. I haven’t been sleeping enough, part of his mind gibbered quietly; I knew the caffeine tablets would do this eventually …

“I am. Sister of Stratagems. The Seventh. I am of the clade of Critics. Talk to me now.”

A look of extreme puzzlement crossed Rubenstein’s craggy face. “Didn’t I have you executed last week?”

“I very much doubt. It.” Hot breath that stank of cabbage, corruption and soil steamed in Burya’s face.

“Oh, good.” He leaned back, light-headed. “I’d hate to think I was going mad. How did you sneak past my guards?”

The thing in the chair stared at him. It was an unnerving sensation, like being sized up for a hangman’s noose by a man-eating saber-toothed sausage. “You guards are. Nonsapient. No intentional stance. Early now, you learn lesson of not trusting unsapient guards to recognize threat. I made self non-threat within their—you have no word for it.”

“I see.” Burya rubbed his forehead distractedly.

“You do not.” Sister Seventh grinned at Rubenstein, and he recoiled before the twenty-centimeter digging fangs, yellow-brown and hard enough to crack concrete. “Ask no questions, human. I ask, are you sapient?

Evidence ambiguous. Only sapients create art, but your works not distinctive.”

“I don’t think—” He stopped. “Why do you want to know?”

“A question.” The thing carried on grinning at him. “You asked. A question.”

It rocked from side to side, shivering slightly, and Rubenstein began feeling cautiously along the underside of his desk, for the panic button that would set alarm bells ringing in the guardroom. “Good question. I Critic am. Critics follow Festival for many lifetimes. We come to Criticize. First want I to know, am I Criticizing sapients? Or is just puppet show on cave wall of reality?

Zombies or zimboes? Shadows of mind? Amusements for Eschaton?”

A shiver ran up and down Burya’s spine. “I think I’m sapient,” he said cautiously. “Of course, I’d say that even if I wasn’t, wouldn’t I? Your question is unanswerable. So why ask it?”

Sister Seventh leaned forward. “None of your people ask anything,” she hissed. “Food, yes. Guns, yes. Wisdom? No. Am beginning think you not aware of selves, ask nothing.”

“What’s to ask for?” Burya shrugged. “We know who we are and what we’re doing. What should we want—alien philosophies?”

“Aliens want your philosophy,” Sister Seventh pointed out. “You give. You not take. This is insult to Festival. Why? Prime interrogative!”

“I’m not sure I understand. Are you complaining because we’re not making demands?”

Sister Seventh chomped at the air, clattering her tusks together. “Ack!

Quote, the viability of a postsingularity economy of scarcity is indicated by the transition from an indirection-layer-based economy using markers of exchange of goods and services to a tree-structured economy characterized by optimal allocation of productivity systems in accordance with iterated tit-for-tat prisoner’s dilemma. Money is a symptom of poverty and inefficiency. Unquote, the Marxist-Gilderist manifesto. Chapter two.

Why you not performing?”

“Because most of our people aren’t ready for that,” Burya said bluntly. A tension in his back began to relax; if this monstrous Critic wanted to debate revolutionary dialectic, well of course he could oblige! “When we achieve the post-technological Utopia, it will be as you say. But for now, we need a vanguard party to lead the people to a full understanding of the principles of ideological correctness and posteconomic optimization.”

“But Marxism-Gilderism and Democratic Extropianism is anarchist aesthetic.

Why vanguard party? Why committee? Why revolution?”

“Because it’s traditional, dammit!” Rubenstein exploded. “We’ve been waiting for this particular revolution for more than two hundred years.

Before that, two hundred years back to the first revolution, this is how we’ve gone about it. And it works! So why shouldn’t we do it this way?”

“Talk you of tradition in middle of singularity.” Sister Seventh twisted her head around to look out the windows at the foggy evening drizzle beyond. ”Perplexity maximizes. Not understand singularity is discontinuity with all tradition? Revolution is necessary; deconstruct the old, ring in the new. Before, I questioned your sapience. Now, your sanity questionable: sapience not. Only sapient organism could exhibit superlative irrationality!“

“That may be true.” Rubenstein gently squeezed the buzzer under his desk edge for the third time. Why isn’t it working? He wondered. “But what do you want here, with me?”

Sister Seventh bared her teeth in a grin. “I come to deliver Criticism.” Ruby teardrop eyes focused on him as she surged to her feet, rippling slabs of muscle moving under her muddy brown skin. A fringe of reddish hair rippled erect on the Critic’s head. “Your guards not answer. I Criticize. You come: now!”

The operations room on board the Lord Vanek was quiet, relaxed by comparison with the near panic at Wolf Depository; still, nobody could have mistaken it for a home cruise. Not with Ilya Murametz standing at the rear, watching everything intently. Not with the old man dropping by at least twice a day, just nodding from inside the doorway, but letting them know he was there. Not with the Admiral’s occasional presence, glowering silently from his wheelchair like a reminder of the last war.

“Final maneuver option in one hour,” announced the helm supervisor.

“Continue as ordered.”

“Continue as ordered, aye. Recce? Your ball.”

“Ready and waiting.” Lieutenant Marek turned around in his chair and looked at Ilya inquiringly. “Do you want to inspect the drone, sir?”

“No. If it doesn’t run, I’ll know whom to blame.” Ilya smiled, trying to pull some of the sting from his words; with his lips pulled back from his teeth, it merely made him look like a cornered wolf. “Launch profile?”

“Holding at minus ten minutes, sir.”

“Right, then. Run the self-test sequence again. It can’t hurt.” Everyone was on edge from not knowing for sure whether the metallic reflector they’d picked up was the time capsule from home. Maybe the drone would tell them, and maybe not. But the longer they waited, the more edgy everyone got, and the edgier they were, the more likely they were to make mistakes.

“Looks pretty good to me. Engine idle at about one percent, fuel tanks loaded, ullage rail and umbilical disconnects latched and ready, instrument package singing loud on all channels. I’m ready to begin launch bay closeout whenever you say, sir.”

“Well then.” Ilya breathed deeply. “Get on the blower to whoever’s keeping an eye on it. Get things moving.”

Down near the back end of the ship, far below the drive compartment and stores, lay a series of airlocks. Some of them were small, designed for crew egress; others were larger, and held entire service vehicles like the station transfer shuttle. One bay, the largest of all, held a pair of reconnaissance drones: three-hundred-tonne robots capable of surveying a star system or mapping a gas giant’s moons. The drones couldn’t carry a gravity drive (nothing much smaller than a destroyer could manage that), but they could boost at a respectable twentieth of a gee on the back of their nuclear-electric ion rocket, and they could keep it up for a very long time indeed.

For faster flybys, they could be equipped with salt-water-fueled fission rockets like those of the Lord Vanek’s long-range torpedoes—but those were dirty, relatively inefficient, and not at all suited to the stealthy mapping of a planetary system.

Each of the drones carried an instrument package studded with more sensors than every probe launched from Earth during the twentieth century.

They were a throwback to the Lord Vanek’s nominal design mission, the semi-ironic goal inscribed on the end-user certificate: to boldly go where no man had gone before, to map new star systems on long-duration missions, and claim them in the name of the Emperor. Dropped off in an uninhabited system, a probe could map it in a couple of years and be ready to report in full when the battlecruiser returned from its own destination. They were a force multiplier for the colonial cartographers, enabling one survey ship to map three systems simultaneously.

Deep in the guts of the Lord Vanek, probe one was now waking up from its two-year sleep. A team of ratings hurried under the vigilant gaze of two chief petty officers, uncoupling the heavy fueling pipes and locking down inspection hatches. Sitting in a lead-lined coffin, probe one gurgled and pinged on a belly full of reaction mass and liquid water refrigerant. The compact fusion reactor buzzed gently, its beat-wave accelerators ramming a mixture of electrons and pions into a stream of lithium ions at just under the speed of light; neutrons spalled off, soaked into the jacket of water pipes, warming them and feeding pressure waves into the closed-circuit cooling system. The secondary solar generators, dismounted for this mission because of their irrelevance, lay in sheets at one end of the probe bay.

“Five minutes to go. Launch bay reports main reactor compartment closeout. Wet crew have cleared the fueling hoses, report tank pressure is stable. I’m still waiting on telemetry closeout.”

“Carry on.” Ilya watched patiently as Marek’s team monitored progress on the launch. He looked around briefly as the ops room door slid open; but it wasn’t the Captain or the Commodore, just the spy—no, the diplomatic agent from Earth. Whose presence was a waste of air and space, the Commander opined, although he could see reasons why the Admiral and his staff might not want to impede her nosy scrutiny.

“What are you launching?” she asked shortly.

“Survey drone.”

“What are you surveying?”

He turned and stared at her. “I don’t remember being told you had authority to oversee anything except our military activities,” he commented.

The inspector shrugged, as if attempting to ignore the insult. “Perhaps if you told me what you were looking for, I could help you find it,” she said.

“Unlikely.” He turned away. “Status, lieutenant?”

‘Two minutes to go. Telemetry bay closeout. Ah, we have confirmation of onboard control. It’s alive in there. Waiting on ullage baffle check, launch rail windup, bay depressurization coming up in sixty seconds.“

“There’s the message capsule,” the inspector said quietly. “Hoping for a letter from home, Commander?”

“You are annoying me,” Ilya said, almost casually. “That’s a bad idea. I say, over there! Yes, you! Status please!”

“Bay pressure cell dump in progress. External launch door opening …

launch rail power on the bus, probe going to internal power, switch over now. She’s on her own, sir. Launch in one minute. Final pre-flight self-test in progress.”

“It’s my job to ask uncomfortable questions, Commander. And the important question to ask now is—”

“Quiet, please!”

“—Was the artifact you’re about to prod placed there by order of your Admiralty, or by the Festival?”

“Launch in three-zero seconds,” Lieutenant Marek announced into the silence. He looked up. “Was it something I said?”

“What are you talking about?” asked Ilya.

Rachel shook her head. Arms crossed: “If you don’t want to listen, be my guest.”

“One-zero seconds to launch. Ullage pressure jets open. Reactor criticality coming up. Muon flux ramp nominal, accelerator gates clear. Um, reactor flux doubling has passed bootstrap level. Five seconds. Launch rail is go!

Main heat pump is down to operating temperature!” The deck began to shudder, vibrating deep beneath the soles of their feet. ‘Two seconds.

Reactor on temperature. Umbilical separation. Zero. We have full separation now. Probe one is clear of the launch bay. Doors closing.

Gyrodyne turn in progress, ullage pressure maximal, three seconds to main engine ignition.“ The shudder died away. ”Deflection angle clear. Main engine ignition.“ In the ops room, nothing stirred; but bare meters away from the ship, the probe’s stingerlike tail spat a red-orange beam of heavy metal ions. It began to drop away from the battlecruiser: as it did so, two huge wings, the thermal radiators, began to extend from its sides.