Singularity Sky

by Charles Stross

  Martin nodded shakily. “Have you any idea how much this ship is worth?” he asked. “MiG put it together. MiG stands to make a lot of money selling copies: more if it earns a distinguished combat record. Has it occurred to you that my primary employers—the people you rented me from—have a legitimate interest in seeing how you’ve changed around the ship they delivered to you?”

  Sauer tossed the cartridge on Martin’s bunk. “Plausible. You’re doing well, so far: don’t let it go to your head.” He turned and rapped on the door. “If that’s your final story, I’ll pass it on to the Captain. If you have anything else to tell me, let the supervisor know when he brings your lunch.”

  “Is that all?” Martin asked as the door opened.

  “Is that all?” Sauer shook his head. “You confess to a capital offense, and ask if that’s all?” He paused in the doorway and stared at Martin, expressionless. “Yes, that’s all. Recording off.”

  Then he was gone.

  vassily had gone to Lieutenant Sauer immediately after the abortive search through Rachel’s luggage: badly frightened, needing advice. He’d poured everything out before Sauer, who had nodded reassuringly and calmed him down before explaining what they were going to do.

  “They’re in it together, son, that much is clear. But you should have talked to me first. Let’s see this gadget you took from him, hmm?” Vassily had passed him the cartridge he’d stolen from Martin’s PA. Sauer took one look at it and nodded to himself. “Never seen one of these before, have you? Well, don’t worry; it’s just the lever we need.” He tapped the exhausted causal channel significantly. “Don’t know why he had this on board, but it was bloody stupid of him, clear breach of His Majesty’s regulations. You could have come to me with it immediately, no questions asked, instead of digging around the woman’s luggage. Which, of course, you didn’t do. Did you?”

  “Uh—no, sir.”

  “Jolly good.” Sauer nodded to himself again. “Because, if you had, I’d have to arrest you, of course. But I suppose, if she left her door unlocked and some enlisted man tried to help himself to her wardrobe, well, we can investigate it . . .” He trailed off thoughtfully.

  “Why can’t we arrest the woman, sir? For, um, possession of illicit machinery?”

  “Because”—Sauer looked down his nose at Vassily—“she’s got a diplomatic passport. She’s allowed to have illegal machinery in her luggage. And, frankly, far as I can tell, she’s got an excuse. Would you be complaining if she had a sewing machine? That’s what she’ll say it is; a garment fabricator.”

  “But I saw these things coming out of there, with too many legs! They were after me—”

  “Nobody else has seen them,” Sauer said in a soothing tone of voice. “I believe you; you probably did see something. Spy robots, perhaps. But good ones, good enough to hide—and without evidence—” He shrugged.

  “What are you going to do, then, sir?”

  Sauer glanced away. “I think we’re going to pay Mr. Springfield a visit,” he murmured. “We’ll take him away. Stick him in the cells for a bit. And then”—he grinned, unpleasantly—“we’ll see which way our diplomat jumps. Which should tell us what all this means, shouldn’t it?”

  Neither of them noticed the pair of polka-dotted knickers hiding behind the ventilation duct overhead, listening patiently and recording everything.

  confessions

  the lord vanek accelerated at an economical two gees, using its drive kernel to curve the space-time ahead of it into a valley into which it slid easily, without imposing punishing stress on crew or machinery. Ninety-two thousand tonnes of warship (with an eight-billion-tonne black hole at her core) took a lot of moving, but once set in motion, it could go places fast. It would take days to cross the vast gulf that separated Lord Vanek’s parking station from the first jump point on the return leg of its timelike path—but nothing like the years that humanity’s earliest probes had taken to cover similar distances.

  The ships of the fleet had traveled barely twenty light-years from the New Republic, but in the process, they had hopped forward in time by four thousand years, zigzagging between the two planetless components of the binary system in an attempt to outrun any long-term surveillance that the Festival might have placed on them. Soon the spacelike component of the voyage would commence, with a cruise to a similar system not far from Rochard’s World; then the fleet would pursue a bizarre trajectory, looping back into the past of their own world line without actually intersecting that of their origin point.

  Along the way, the fleet tenders would regularly top up the warships with consumable provisions, air and water and food; no less than eight merchant ships would be completely stripped and abandoned to fall forever between the stars, their crews doubled up aboard other vessels. The voyage would strain the Navy’s logistic system beyond the point of failure: something had to give, and an entire year’s shipbuilding budget would go into the supply side of this operation alone.

  As they cruised between jumps, the warships exercised continually. Tentative lidar pulses strobed at the deep vacuum beyond the heliopause as officers sought firing solutions on the ships of the other squadrons; missile and torpedo trajectories were plotted, laser firing solutions entered into the tireless gear mills of the analytical engines. Tracking ships at long range was difficult, for they didn’t emit much detectable radiation. Radar was hopeless: to pump out sufficient energy to get a return, the Lord Vanek would have produced enough waste heat to broil her crew alive. As it was, only her vast radiator panels, spread to the stars and now glowing a dull red, allowed them to run the lidar at high intensity for short periods of time. (Vacuum is a most effective insulator—and active sensors capable of reaching out across billions of kilometers run hot.)

  Martin Springfield knew nothing of this. Lying in his cell he’d spent the past two days in despondent boredom, alternating between depression and guarded optimism by turns. Still alive, he thought. Then: Not for long. If only there was something he could do! But on board a starship, there was nowhere to run. He was enough of a realist to understand this: if they ran out of options here, he was dead. He’d simply have to hope that they hadn’t worked out what he’d done, and would release him rather than antagonizing the shipyard.

  He was sitting on the bunk one evening when the door opened. He looked up at once, expecting Sauer or the Curator’s kid spook. His eyes widened. “What are you doing here?”

  “Just visiting. Mind if I sit down?”

  He nodded uneasily. Rachel sat on the edge of the bunk. She was wearing a plain black jumpsuit and had tied her hair back severely; her manner was different, almost relaxed. It wasn’t a disguise, he realized; she wasn’t acting the part of a woman of easy virtue or a diplomat posted to a banana republic, or anyone else, for that matter. She was being herself—a formidable figure. “I thought they’d have locked you up, too,” he said.

  “Yes, well . . .” She looked distracted. “One moment.” She glanced at her pocket watch. “Ah.” She leaned over toward the head end of his bunk and placed something small and metallic on it.

  “I already spiked the bugs,” he said. “They won’t hear much.”

  She glared at him. “Thanks for nothing.”

  “What—”

  “I want the truth,” she said flatly. “You’ve been lying to me. I want to know why.”

  “Oh.” He tried not to cringe. Her expression was unnaturally controlled, the calm before a storm.

  “You’ve got only one chance to tell the truth,” she said, pitching her voice in conversational tones that were belied by a brittle edge in it. “I don’t think they know you’re lying yet, but when we get back—well, they’re not dummies and you’re digging yourself in deeper. The Curator’s Office will be watching. If you act guilty, the boy wonder will draw the only available conclusion.”

  He sighed. “And what if the conclusion is right? What if I am guilty?” he asked.

  “I trusted you,” she said flatly. “As
yourself. Not as a player. I don’t like being lied to, Martin. In business or my personal life, whichever.”

  “Well.” He contemplated the shiny jammer she’d placed on his pillow. It was easier than facing her anger and hurt. “If I said they told me they were the shipyard, would that satisfy you?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “You’re not dumb enough to fall for a cover story, anyway.” She looked away. “I don’t like being lied to,” she said bitterly.

  He looked at her. Rachel was an up-to-date professional, unlike the bumbling amateurs of the New Republic; she’d have speech analysis reflexes, lie detectors, any number of other gadgets trained on him, if this was business, and if she hadn’t completely lost it. If she had—well, he could hardly blame her for being mad at him. In her place, he’d be angry, too. And hurt. “I don’t like telling lies,” he said, which was true enough. “Not without an overriding reason,” he admitted.

  She took a deep breath, visibly steeling herself. “I’m the nearest thing to a lawyer you’re going to get here, Martin. I’m the nearest representative of your government—what they think is your government—within four thousand years and a two-hundred-light-year radius. They have a legalistic system of government, for all that they’re medieval throwbacks, and they let me visit you as your advocate. I can plead your case if it comes up to a court-martial because you’re a civilian, and I might be able to deflect things short of that. But only if you tell me everything, so I know what I’m defending.”

  “I can’t talk about it,” he said uncomfortably. He picked up his book, half trying to shelter his guilty conscience behind it. “I’m not allowed to. I thought you of all people would be able to understand that?”

  “Listen.” Rachel glared at him. “Remember what I told you about trust? I’m really disappointed. Because I did trust you, and it seems to me that you betrayed that trust. As it is, I’m going to have to do a lot of fast talking if I’m going to try to get your ass off the hook you’re caught on, or at least get you out of here alive. And before I do that, I want to know what you’ve been lying to me about.”

  She stood up. “I’m a fool. And a damned fool for trusting you, and a worse fool for getting involved with you. Hell, I’m an unprofessional fool! But I’m going to ask you again, and you’d better answer truthfully. There are a lot of lives at stake this time, Martin, because this is not a game. Who the fuck are you working for?”

  Martin paused a moment, dizzy with a sense of events moving out of control. Can’t tell her, can’t not tell her—he looked up, meeting her eyes for the first time. It was the hurt expression that made his mind up for him: no amount of rationalization would help him sleep that night if he left her feeling like this. Feeling betrayed by the only person she’d been able to trust within a radius of light-years. One moment of unprofessionalism deserved to be answered by another. His mouth felt dry and clumsy as he spoke: “I work for the Eschaton.”

  Rachel sat down heavily, her eyes wide with disbelief. “What?”

  He shrugged. “You think the E’s only way of dealing with problems is to drop a rock on them?” he asked.

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Nope.” He could taste bile in the back of his throat. “And I believe in what I’m doing, else I wouldn’t be here now, would I? Because truly, the alternative is to drop a planet-buster on the problem. The Eschaton finds that easier. And it makes the appropriate noises. It scares people. But really—most of the time, the E likes to solve problems more quietly through people like me.”

  “How long?”

  “About twenty years.” He shrugged again. “That’s all there is to it.”

  “Why?” She buried her hands between her knees, holding them together tightly, looking at him with a miserably confused expression on her face.

  “Because—” He tried to drag his scattered thoughts together. “Believe me, the Eschaton prefers it when people like you do the job first. It saves a lot of pain all around. But once the fleet moved, and you lost the argument with them, there was no alternative. You didn’t really think they’d set up the prerequisites for a closed timelike path and not follow it through to the logical end?” He took a deep breath. “That’s the sort of job I do. I’m a plumber, for when the Eschaton wants to fix a leak quietly.”

  “You’re an agent, you mean.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “Like you.”

  “Like me.” She made a croaking noise that sounded as if it might have been intended as a laugh. “Shit, Martin, that is not what I was expecting to hear.”

  “I wish this hadn’t happened. Especially with—well, us. In the middle.”

  “Me too, with brass knobs on,” she said shakily. “Was that all there was?”

  “All there was? That’s all I was holding out on you, honest.”

  A long pause. “Alright. It was, uh, purely professional?”

  He nodded. “Yes.” He looked at her. “I don’t like lying. And I haven’t been lying, or withholding the truth, about anything else. I promise.”

  “Oh. Okay.” She took a deep breath and grinned tiredly, simultaneously looking amused and relieved.

  “It’s really been eating you, hasn’t it?” he asked.

  “Oh, you could say that,” she said, with heavy irony.

  “Um.” He held out a hand. “I’m sorry. Truly.”

  “Apology accepted—conditionally.” She squeezed his hand, briefly, then let go. “Now, are you going to tell me what the Eschaton has in mind for us?”

  Martin sighed. “Yes, inasmuch as I know. But I’ve got to warn you, it’s not good. If we can’t get off this ship before it arrives, we’re probably going to die . . .”

  time travel destabilizes history.

  History is a child of contingency; so many events depend on critical misunderstandings or transient encounters that even the apocryphal butterfly’s wing is apt to stir up a storm in short order. A single misunderstood telegram in June of 1917 permitted the Bolshevik revolution to become a possibility; a single spy in 1958 extended the Cold War by a decade. And without both such events, could a being like the Eschaton ever have come to exist?

  Of course, in a universe which permits time travel, history itself becomes unstable—and the equilibrium can only be restored when the diabolical mechanism edits itself out of the picture. But that’s scant comfort for the trillions of entities who silently cease to exist in the wake of a full-blown time storm.

  It’s hardly surprising that, whenever intelligent beings arise in such a universe, they will seek to use closed timelike curves to prevent their own extinction. Faster-than-light travel being possible, general relativity tells us that it is indistinguishable from time travel; and this similarity makes the technologies of total annihilation dreadfully accessible. In the small, stupid little organizations like the New Republic seek to gain advantage over their contemporaries and rivals. In the large, vast, cool intellects seek to stabilize their universe in the form most suitable to them. Their tampering may be as simple as preventing rivals from editing them out of the stable historical record—or it may be as sophisticated as meddling with the early epochs of the big bang, back before the Higgs field decayed into the separate fundamental forces that bind the universe together to ensure just the right ratio of physical constants to support life.

  This is not the only universe; far from it. It isn’t even the only universe in which life exists. Like living organisms, universes exist balanced on the edge of chaos, little bubbles of twisted ur-space that pinch off and bloat outward, expanding and cooling, presently giving birth to further bubbles of condensed space-time; a hyperdimensional crystal garden full of strange trees bearing stranger fruit.

  But the other universes are not much use to us. There are too many variables in the mix. As the initial burst of energy that signals the birth of a universe cools, the surging force field that drives its initial expansion becomes tenuous, then breaks down into a complex mess of other forces. The constants that determine their re
lative strengths are set casually, randomly. There are universes with only two forces; others, with thousands. (Ours has five.) There are universes where the electron is massive: nuclear fusion is so easy there that the era of star formation ends less than a million of our years after the big bang. Chemistry is difficult there, and long before life can evolve, such universes contain nothing but cooling pulsars and black holes, the debris of creation brought to a premature end.

  There are universes where photons have mass—others where there is too little mass in the universe for it to achieve closure and collapse in a big crunch at the end of time. There are, in fact, an infinity of universes out there, and they are all uninhabitable. There is a smaller infinitude of possibly habitable ones, and in some of them, intelligent life evolves; but more than that we may never know. Travel between universes is nearly impossible; materials that exist in one may be unstable in another. So, trapped in our little fishbowl of space we drift through the crystal garden of universes—and our own neighborly intelligences, beings like the Eschaton, do their best to prevent the less-clever inmates from smashing the glass from within.

  The man in gray had explained all this to Martin at length, eighteen years ago. “The Eschaton has a strong interest in maintaining the integrity of the world line,” he had said. “It’s in your interest, too. Once people begin meddling with the more obscure causal paradoxes, all sorts of lethal side-effects can happen. The Eschaton is as vulnerable to this as any other being in the universe—it didn’t create this place, you know, it just gets to live in it with the rest of us. It may be a massively superhuman intelligence or cluster of intelligences, it may have resources we can barely comprehend, but it could probably be snuffed out quite easily; just a few nuclear weapons in the right place before it bootstrapped into consciousness, out of the pre-Singularity networks of the twenty-first century. Without the Eschaton, the human species would probably be extinct by now.”