Singularity Sky (42 page)

On the second morning of the search for Felix, Burya awakened exhausted, limbs aching and sore, feet half frozen, in one corner of the walking hut.

Sister Seventh was elsewhere, snuffling and crashing in the undergrowth beside the path. Bright polymer-walled yurts clung to the fringes of the clearing they’d camped in. A growth of trees around them struggled defiantly beneath huge shelf fungi that threatened to turn them into many-colored outcroppings. All around them grew gigantic ferns and purple-veined cycads, interstellar colonists planted by the unseen gardeners of the Festival fleet. Small mouselike creatures tended the ferns, bringing them scraps of decaying matter and attaching them to the sundew-like feeding palps that sprouted from their stems.

According to the presingularity maps, they should have passed a village two kilometers ago, but they’d seen no sign of it. Instead, they’d passed beneath a huge drifting geodesic sphere that had turned the sunset to flame overhead, making one of the cyborg militia shout and fire wildly into the air until Sergeant Lukcas yelled at him and took his gun away. “It’s a farm, pighead,” he’d explained with heavy-handed irony, “like what you grew up on, only rolled into a ball and flying around the sky. And if you don’t stop shooting at it, we’ll use your head the same way.” Some of the guards had muttered and made signs to avert the evil eye—in one case using a newly functional set of mandibles—and the rabbit walked with his ears laid flat along his head for half a kilometer before they made camp, but there were no further untoward incidents before the end of the road. But now the road had definitely come to an end.

The posse had made good progress along the Emperor’s metaled highways to reach this point; but ahead of them, the Lysenkoist forest was attempting to assimilate the road. Small, eyeless rodents with fine pelts gnawed mindlessly at the asphalt surface, extruding black pellets that were swarmed over by not-ants the size of grasshoppers. Tall clay structures not unlike termite mounds dotted the open spaces between the ferns: they hummed quietly with a noise like a million microscopic gas turbines.

The campfire crackled ominously and belched steam as Mr. Rabbit threw scraps of dead, fungus-riddled wood on it. Burya yawned and stretched in the cold air, then stumbled off to find a tree to piss behind. Bedrolls stirred on the ground, militiamen grumbling and demanding coffee, food, and sexual favors from a nonexistent cook. There was a gout of flame and the rabbit jumped backward, narrowly missing a soldier who howled curses; the road castings were highly inflammable.

After pissing, Burya squatted. It was in this undignified position that Sister Seventh, in an unusually avuncular mood, found him.

“Greetings of morning and good micturations to you! News of outstandingness and grace bring I.”

“Harrumph.” Burya glared at the giant rodent, his ears meanwhile flushing red with the effort of evacuation. “Has anybody told you it isn’t polite to stare?”

“At what?” Sister Seventh looked puzzled.

“Nothing,” he muttered. “What’s this news?”

“Why, of importance nothing.” The Critic turned away innocently. “Of pleasing symmetry—”

Burya gritted his teeth, then began fumbling about for leaves. (This was something that had never been mentioned in the biographies of the famous revolutionaries, he noted vaguely; being attacked by bears and pursued by bandits or Royal mounted police was all very exciting and noteworthy, but the books never said anything about the shortage of toilet paper in the outback, or the way there were never any soft leaves around when you needed them.) “Just the facts.”

“Visitors! My sibling’s nest overflows with a bounty of information.”

“Visitors? But—” Burya stopped. “Your siblings. In orbit?”

“Yes!” Sister Seventh rolled forward and over, waving her stubby legs in the air briefly before tumbling over with a loud thud. “Visitors from space!”

“Where from?” Burya leaned forward eagerly.

“The New Republic.” Sister Seventh grinned amusedly, baring huge, yellowed tusks. ”Sent fleet. Met Bouncers. There were survivors.“

“Who, dammit!” He gritted his teeth angrily as he yanked his trousers up.

“Ambassador from Earth-prime. One other-else-who component-wise is part of her hive. And ambiguosity. They inquire for you, yourself. Want to meet?”

Burya gaped. “They’re coming here?”

“They land at our destination. Soon.”

The lifeboat was dark, hot, and stank of methane; the waste gas scrubber had developed an asthmatic wheeze. By any estimate, the life-support loop was only good for another day or so of breathable air before they had to retreat into their suits—but long before then, the passengers would have to face the perils of reentry.

“Are you sure this is safe?” asked Vassily.

Rachel rolled her eyes. “Safe, he asks,” muttered Martin. “Kid, if you wanted safe, you should have stayed home when the fleet left port.”

“But I don’t understand—you’ve been talking to those aliens. They’re the enemy! They just killed half our fleet! But you’re taking orbital elements and course correction advisories from them. Why are you so trusting? How do you know they won’t kill us, too?”

“They’re not the enemy,” Rachel said, patiently prodding away at the autopilot console. “They never were the enemy— at least, not the kind of enemy the Admiral and his merry band expected.”

“But if they’re not your enemy, you must be on their side!” Vassily glanced from one of them to the other, thoroughly spooked now.

“Nope.” Rachel carried on prodding at the autopilot. “I wasn’t sure before, but I am, now: the Festival isn’t anything like you think it is. You guys came out here expecting an attack by a foreign government, with ships and soldiers, didn’t you? But there are more things out in this universe than humans and their nations and multinational organizations. You’ve been fighting a shadow.”

“But it destroyed all those ships! It’s hostile! It—”

“Calm down.” Martin watched him cautiously. Ungrateful little shit: or is he just terminally confused? Rachel’s easy conversation with the Critics had unsettled Martin more than he liked to admit, almost as much as her unexpectedly successful rescue attempt. There were wheels within wheels here, more than he’d expected. “There are no sides. The Critics aren’t enemies; they aren’t even part of the Festival. We tried to tell your people to expect something totally alien, but they wouldn’t listen.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Festival isn’t human, it isn’t remotely human. You people are thinking in terms of people with people-type motivations; that’s wrong, and it’s been clear that it’s wrong from the start. You can no more declare war on the Festival than you can declare a war against sleep. It’s a self-replicating information network. Probe enters a system: probe builds a self-extending communications network and yanks the inhabited worlds of that system into it. Drains all the information it can get out of the target civilization, then spawns more probes. The probes carry some parasites, uploaded life-forms that build bodies and download into them whenever they reach a destination—but that’s not what it exists for.”

Vassily gaped. “But it attacked us!”

“No it didn’t,” Martin replied patiently. “It isn’t intelligent; analyzing its behavior by adopting an intentional stance is a mistake. All it did was detect an inhabited planet with no telephone service at a range of some light-years and obey its instructions.”

“But the instructions—it’s war!”

“No, it’s a bug fix. It turns out that the Festival is just a—a telephone repairman. Like a robot repairman. Only it doesn’t repair mere telephones—it repairs holes in the galactic information flow.” Martin glanced sideways at Rachel. She was wrestling with the autopilot, getting the landing burn sequence keyed in. It was a bad idea to distract her at a time like this; better keep the young nuisance occupied.

“Civilizations rise and fall from time to time; the Festival is probably a mechanism set in place a few millennia ago to keep them in touch, built by an interstellar culture back in the mists of time. When it detected a hole in the net it maintains, it decided to fix it, which is why it set up to do business in orbit around Rochard’s World, which is about as isolated and cut off as it’s possible to be.”

“But we didn’t ask for it,” Vassily said uncertainly.

“Well, of course not. Actually, I think it’s strayed outside its original maintenance zone, so every system it discovers in this sector warrants a repair job: but that’s not necessarily all there is to it. Part of the repair process is a rapid exchange of information with the rest of the network it connects to, a flow that runs in two directions. Over time, the Festival has become more than a mere repair service; it’s become a civilization in its own right, one that blooms like a desert flower—briefly flourishing in the right environment, then curling up into a seed and sleeping as it migrates across the deserted gulf light-years between oases. Telephone switches and routers are some of the most complicated information-processing systems ever invented—where do you think the Eschaton originally came from?

“When the Festival arrived at Rochard’s World, it had a 250-year communications deficit to make good. That repair—the end of isolation, arrival of goods and ideas restricted by the New Republic—caused a limited local singularity, what in our business we call a consensus reality excursion; people went a little crazy, that’s all. A sudden overdose of change; immortality, bio-engineering, weakly superhuman AI arbeiters, nanotechnology, that sort of thing. It isn’t an attack.”

“But then—you’re telling me they brought unrestricted communications with them?” he asked.

“Yup.” Rachel looked up from her console. “We’ve been trying for years to tell your leaders, in the nicest possible way: information wants to be free.

But they wouldn’t listen. For forty years we tried. Then along comes the Festival, which treats censorship as a malfunction and routes communications around it. The Festival won’t take no for an answer because it doesn’t have an opinion on anything; it just is.”

“But information isn’t free. It can’t be. I mean, some things—if anyone could read anything they wanted, they might read things that would tend to deprave and corrupt them, wouldn’t they? People might give exactly the same consideration to blasphemous pornography that they pay to the Bible!

They could plot against the state, or each other, without the police being able to listen in and stop them!”

Martin sighed. “You’re still hooked on the state thing, aren’t you?” he said.

“Can you take it from me, there are other ways of organizing your civilization?”

“Well—” Vassily blinked at him in mild confusion. “Are you telling me you let information circulate freely where you come from?”

“It’s not a matter of permitting it,” Rachel pointed out. “We had to admit that we couldn’t prevent it. Trying to prevent it was worse than the disease itself.”

“But, but lunatics could brew up biological weapons in their kitchens, destroy cities! Anarchists would acquire the power to overthrow the state, and nobody would be able to tell who they were or where they belonged anymore. The most foul nonsense would be spread, and nobody could stop it—” Vassily paused. “You don’t believe me,” he said plaintively.

“Oh, we believe you alright,” Martin said grimly. “It’s just—look, change isn’t always bad. Sometimes freedom of speech provides a release valve for social tensions that would lead to revolution. And at other times, well—what you’re protesting about boils down to a dislike for anything that disturbs the status quo. You see your government as a security blanket, a warm fluffy cover that’ll protect everybody from anything bad all the time. There’s a lot of that kind of thinking in the New Republic; the idea that people who aren’t kept firmly in their place will automatically behave badly. But where I come from, most people have enough common sense to avoid things that’d harm them; and those that don’t, need to be taught. Censorship just drives problems underground.“

“But, terrorists!”

“Yes,” Rachel interrupted, “terrorists. There are always people who think they’re doing the right thing by inflicting misery on their enemies, kid. And you’re perfectly right about brewing up biological weapons and spreading rumors. But—” She shrugged. “We can live with a low background rate of that sort of thing more easily than we can live with total surveillance and total censorship of everyone, all the time.” She looked grim. “If you think a lunatic planting a nuclear weapon in a city is bad, you’ve never seen what happens when a planet pushes the idea of ubiquitous surveillance and censorship to the limit. There are places where—” She shuddered.

Martin glanced at her. “You’ve got somewhere specific in mind to—”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said tersely. “And you should be ashamed of yourself, winding the boy up like that. Either of you two noticed the air stinks?”

“Yeah.” Martin yawned widely. “Are we about—”

“—I am not a—” A thundering chorus of popping noises sounded outside the cabin. “—boy!” Vassily finished with a squeak.

“Belt up, kid. Main engine coming on in five seconds.”

Martin tensed, unconsciously tightening his belt. “What’s our descent curve?”

“Waypoint one coming up: ten-second course adjustment, one-point-two gees. We sit tight for four minutes or so, then we hit waypoint two, and burn for two hours at two and a quarter gees—this ends ’bout four thousand klicks elevation relative to planetary surface, and we’ll hit atmosphere sixteen minutes later at about four k.p.s. We’ll have some reaction mass left, but I really don’t want to power up the main engine once we’re in air we’ll have to breathe afterward; so we’re going to drop the propulsion module once we’re suborbital and it’ll kick itself back into a graveyard orbit with the last of its fuel.“

“Er.” Vassily looked puzzled. “Four k.p.s. Isn’t that a bit fast?”

“No it’s—” A high-pitched roar cut into Rachel’s explanation, jolting everything in the capsule back toward the rear bulkhead. Ten seconds passed. “It’s only about Mach 12, straight down. And we’ll have dropped the engines overboard, first. But don’t worry, we’ll slow up pretty fast when we hit the atmosphere. They used to do this sort of thing all the time during the Apollo program.”