Singularity Sky (46 page)

Everything our ancestors fought for, torn up and scattered to the winds! A virus of eternal youth is loose in the bees, and the streets are paved with infinite riches. It devalues everything!” He stopped and took a deep breath, disturbed by the degree of his own agitation. “Of course, if we can suppress the revolutionary cadres here in New Petrograd, we can mop up the countryside at our leisure …”

The door to the Star Chamber opened to reveal Admiral Kurtz standing there, resplendent in the gold braid, crimson sash, and chestful of medals that his rank dictated. He looked a decade younger than his age, not two decades older: patrician, white-haired, the very image of a gentleman dictator, reassuringly authoritarian. “Well, gentlemen! Shall we review the crowds?” He did not stride—wasted leg muscles saw to that—but he walked without a hand at either elbow.

“I think that would be a very good idea, sir,” said Robard.

“Indeed.” Leonov and the senior Curator fell into step behind the admiral as he walked toward the staircase. “The sun is setting on anarchy and disarray, gentlemen. Only let my tongue be silver and tomorrow will once again be ours.”

Together, they stepped into the courtyard to address the sheep who, did they but know it, had already returned to the fold.

An amber teardrop the size of a charabanc perched on the edge of a hillside covered in the mummified bones of trees. Ashy telegraph poles coated in a fine layer of soot pointed at the sky; tiny skeletons crunched under Burya Rubenstein’s boots as he walked among them, following a man-sized rabbit.

“Master in here,” said Mr. Rabbit, pointing at the weirdly curved lump.

Rubenstein approached it cautiously, hands clasped behind his back. Yes, it was definitely amber—or something closely resembling it. Flies and bubbles were scattered throughout its higher layers; darkness shrouded its heart. “It’s a lump of fossilized vegetable sap. Your master’s dead, rabbit.

Why did you bring me here?”

The rabbit was upset. His long ears tilted backward, flat along the top of his skull. “Master in here!” He shifted from one foot to the other. “When Mimes attack, master call for help.”

Burya decided to humor the creature. “I see—” He stopped. There was something inside the boulder, something darkly indistinct. And come to think of it, all the trees hereabouts were corpses, fried from the inside out by some terrible energy. The revolutionary guards, already spooked by the Lysenkoist forest, had refused to enter the dead zone. They milled about downslope, debating the ideological necessity of uplifting non-human species to sapience—one of them had taken heated exception to a proposal to giving opposable thumbs and the power of speech to cats—and comparing their increasingly baroque implants. Burya stared closer, feeling himself slip into a blurred double vision as the committee for state communications’ worms fed their own perspective to him. There was something inside the boulder, and it was thinking, artlessly unformed thoughts that tugged at the Festival’s cellular communications network like a toddler at its mother’s skirt.

Taking a deep breath, he leaned against the lump of not-amber. “Who are you?” he demanded noiselessly, feeling the smooth warm surface under his hands. Antennae beneath his skin radiated information into the packetized soup that flooded in cold waves through the forest, awaited a reply.

“Me-Identity: Felix. You-Identity: ???”

“Come out of there with your hands above your head and prepare to submit your fate to the vanguard of revolutionary justice!” Burya gulped. He’d meant to send something along the lines of “Can you come out of there so we can talk?”, but his revolutionary implants evidently included a semiotic dereferencing stage that translated anything he said—through this new cyberspatial medium—into Central Committee sound bites. Angry at the internal censorship, he resolved to override it next time.

“Badly hurt. No connection previous incarnation. Want/ need help metamorphosis.”

Burya turned and leaned his back against the boulder. “You. Rabbit. Can you hear any of this?”

The rabbit sat up and swallowed a mouthful of grass. “Any of what?”

“I’ve been talking to, ah, your master. Can you hear us?”

One ear flicked. “No.”

“Good.” Burya closed his eyes, settled back into double vision, and attempted to communicate. But his implant was still acting up. “How did you get here? What are you trying to achieve? I thought you were in trouble”

came out as “Confess your counter-revolutionary crimes before the tribunal!

What task are you striving to accomplish in the unceasing struggle against reactionary mediocrity and bourgeois incrementalism? I thought you were guilty of malicious hooliganism!”

“Fuck,” he muttered aloud. “There’s got to be a bypass filter—” Ah. “Sorry about that, my interface is ideologically biased. How did you get here?

What are you trying to achieve? I thought you were in trouble.”

An answer slowly burbled up and out of the stone; visual perceptions cut in, and for a few minutes Burya shook in the grip of a young lad’s terrified flight from the Fringe.

“Ah. So. The Festival mummified you pending repairs. And now you’re ready to go somewhere else—where? What’s that?”

Another picture. Stars, endless distance, tiny dense and very hot bodies sleeping the dreamless light-years away. Bursting in a desert storm of foliage on a new world, flowering and dying and sleeping again until next time.

“Let me get this straight. You used to be the governor. Then you were an eight-year-old boy with some friendly talking animals under some kind of geas to ‘lead an interesting life’ and have lots of adventures. Now you want to be a starship? And you want me, as the nearest delegate of the Central Committee for the revolution, to help you?”

Not exactly. Another vision, this time long and complex, burdened by any number of political proposals that his implant irritatingly attempted to convert into plant-yield diagrams indicating the progress toward fruition of an agricultural five-year plan. “You want me to do that?” Burya winced.

“What do you think I am, a free agent? Firstly, the Curator’s Office would shoot me as soon as look at me, much less listen to what they’d view as treason. Secondly, you’re not the governor anymore, and even if you were and proposed something like this, they’d sack you faster than you can snap your fingers. In case you didn’t notice those fireworks yesterday, that was the Imperial fleet—what’s left of it—shooting it out with the Festival. Thirdly, the revolutionary committee would be queuing up to shoot me, too, if I proposed something like this. Never underestimate the intrinsic, as opposed to ideological, conservatism of an idea like revolution once it’s got some momentum behind it. No, it’s not practical. I really don’t see why you wasted my time with such a stupid proposal. Not at—”

He stopped. Something downslope was making a lot of noise, thrashing through the kill zone left by the X-ray laser battery. “Who’s there?” he asked, but Mr. Rabbit had vanished in a tuft of panicky white tail fur.

A telephone-pole tree toppled slowly over before the thrashing, and a strange, chicken-legged mound lurched into view. Sister Seventh sat in the hut’s doorway, glaring intently at him. “Burya Rubenstein!” she yelled.

“Come here! Resolution achieved! Cargo retrieved! You have visitors!”

Expecting a momentous meeting, Rachel cast her eyes around the hillside: they took to the air and flew on in-sectile wings, quartering the area for threats.

The trees hereabouts were dead, charred by some terrible force. Martin watched anxiously as she rummaged in the corpulent steamer trunk.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Cornucopia seed,” she said, tossing the fist-sized object at him. He caught it and inspected it curiously.

“All engineering is here,” he marveled. “In miniature.” Several million billion molecular assemblers, a kilowatt of thin-film solar cells to power them, thermodynamic filtration membranes to extract raw feedstocks from the environment, rather more computing power than the whole of the preSingularity planetary Internet. He pocketed the seed, then looked at her.

“You had a reason … ?”

“Yup. We’re not going to have the original for much longer. Don’t let the kid see it, he might guess what it is and flip his lid.” She continued forward.

There was some kind of boulder near the crest of the hill, and a man was leaning against it. The Critic’s house lurched forward, crashing and banging toward it. “If that’s who I hope it is—”

They started up the rise. The trees hereabouts were all dead. Martin stumbled over a rounded stone and kicked at it, cursing: he stopped when it revealed itself to be a human skull, encrusted with metallic fibrils.

“Something bad happened here.”

“Big surprise. Help me steer this thing.” The steamer trunk, now running on fuel cells, was proving balky and hard to control on the grassy slope: half the time they had to drag it over obstacles. “You got any holdouts?”

Martin shrugged. “Do I look like a soldier?”

She squinted at him for a moment. “You’ve got enough hidden depths, dearie. Okay, if it turns nasty, I’ll handle things.”

“Who’s this guy you’re supposed to be seeing, anyway?”

“Burya Rubenstein. Radical underground journalist, big mover and shaker in the underground. Ran a soviet during a major worker’s strike some years ago; got himself exiled for his pains, lucky they didn’t shoot him.”

“And you’re planning to hand—” Martin stopped. “Ah, so that’s what you were planning. That’s how you were going to start a revolution here, before the Festival made it all last year’s news.” He glanced over his shoulder, but Vassily was nowhere to be seen.

“Not exactly. I was just going to give them the tools to do so if they wanted to.” She wiped her forehead on the back of a hand. “Actually, it’s been a contingency plan for years, only we never quite had a good enough reason to do it—initiation of force, that kind of thing. Now, well, the whole game’s changed. Far as I can tell, Rubenstein’s lot survived the transition to a postscarcity economy; they may be the nearest thing to civil authorities on this two-bit backwater colony right now. When the Festival gets bored and moves on, they may not be able to survive without a cornucopia. Assuming, of course, that they didn’t ask the Festival for one straight off.” The luggage surged forward, getting a grip on the ground, and she stopped talking for a while to concentrate on steering it up the hill.

“So what was your exit strategy?” Martin asked, walking along behind her.

“Exit strategy? We don’t need no stinking exit strategy! Just—deliver this.

Then melt into the chaos. Find somewhere to live. Settle down till trade resumes. Ship out. You?”

“About the same. Herman has a way of catching up after a while. Uh, did you have anywhere in mind to—”

“Small town called Plotsk.” She jerked her head sharply. “First things first. I need to deliver the package. Then we need to ditch laughing boy somewhere safe where he can’t follow us, hmm? Aside from that, I was wondering if—well. About us.”

Martin reached out and took her free hand. “Wondering if you were going to get rid of me?”

She stared at him. “Mm. Why—am I going to have to?”

Martin took a deep breath. “Do you want to get rid of me?”

She shook her head.

Martin gently pulled her toward him, until she leaned against him. “Me neither,” he murmured in her ear.

“Two of us stand a better chance than one, anyway,” she rationalized. “We can watch each other’s backs, it’s going to be hairy for a while. Plus, we may be stuck here for some time. Years, even.”

“Rachel. Stop making excuses.”

She sighed. “Am I that transparent?”

“You’ve got a worse sense of duty than—” She pulled back a little, and he stopped, seeing the warning glint in her eyes. Then she began to laugh quietly, and after a moment he joined her.

“I can think of much worse people to be stranded with in the middle of a backwater recovering from a revolution, Martin, believe me—”

“Okay, I believe you, I believe you!” She leaned forward and kissed him, hard, then let go with a smile.

The luggage was rolling smoothly now, and the slope of the ground was flattening out. The boulder above them glowed yellow in the afternoon light; and the man who’d been leaning against it was deep in animated arm-waving conversation with the huge Critic. As they approached, he turned to face them: a wiry, short man with bushy hair, a goatee, and the antique affectation of pince-nez. Judging by the state of his clothing he’d been on the road for some time. “Who are you?” he demanded aggressively.

“Burya Rubenstein?” Rachel asked tiredly.

“Yes?” He glared at her suspiciously. “You have countermeasures!”

“Parcel for Burya Rubenstein, care of the Democratic Revolutionary Party, Rochard’s World. You wouldn’t believe how far it’s come or how many hoops I’ve had to jump through to get it to you.”

“Ah—” He stared at the trunk, then back at Rachel. “Who did you say you were?”

“Friends from Old Earth,” Martin grunted. “Also hungry, dirty, shipwrecked survivors.”

“Well, you won’t find any decent hospitality here.” Rubenstein swept a hand around the clearing. “Old Earth, did you say? Now that is a long way to come with a parcel! Just what exactly is it?”

“It’s a cornucopia machine. Self-replicating factory, fully programmable, and it’s yours. A gift from Earth. The means of production in one handy self-propelled package. We hoped you might feel like starting an industrial revolution. At least we did before we found out about the Festival.” Rachel blinked as Rubenstein threw back his head and laughed wildly.

“Just what exactly is that meant to mean?” she demanded irritably. “I’ve come forty light-years, at not inconsiderable risk, to deliver a message you’d have murdered for six months ago. Don’t you think you could explain yourself?”

“Oh, madam, please accept my apologies. I do you a disservice. If you’d delivered this even four weeks ago, you’d have changed the course of history—of that I have no doubt! But you see”—he straightened up and his expression grew sober—“we have had such devices since the first day of the Festival. And for all the good they’ve done us, I’d just as soon never have set eyes on one.”