Singularity Sky e-1

by Charles Stross

  From the control tower to the castle, events had moved in a dusty blur. Requisitioned transport, a bouncing ride through a half-deserted town, half the houses in it burned to the ground and the other half sprouting weird excrescences. The castle, deserted. Get the Admiral into the Duke’s bedroom. Find the kitchen, see if there’s anything edible in the huge underground larders. Someone hoisted a flag. Guards on the gate. Two timid serving women like little mice, scurrying from hiding and curtsying to the service they’d long since been broken to. A cleaning detail, broken furniture ruthlessly consigned to the firewood heap that would warm the grand ballroom. Emergency curtains—steel-mesh and spider-silk—furled behind the tall and shattered windows. Guards on the gate, with guns. Check the water pipes. More uniforms moving in the dusty afternoon heat. Busy, so busy.

  He’d stolen a minute to break into Citizen Von Beck’s office. None of the revolutionary cadres had got that far into the castle, or survived the active countermeasures. All the Curator’s tools lay handy; Robard had paused to check the emergency causal channel, but its entropy had been thoroughly maximized even though the bandwidth monitor showed more than fifty percent remaining. His worst suspicions confirmed, he made liberal use of the exotic insecticides Von Beck had stocked, spraying his person until the air was blue and chokingly unbreathable. Then he pocketed a small artifact—one that it was illegal on pain of death for anyone not of the Curator’s Office to be in possession of—left the room, locked it behind him, and returned to the duties of the Admiral’s manservant.

  The aimless cluster outside the Ducal palace had somehow metamorphosed into a crowd while he’d been busy. Anxious, pinched faces stared at him: the faces of people uncertain who they were, bereft of their place in the scheme of things. Lost people, desperately seeking reassurance. Doubtless many would have joined the dissident underground; many more would have made full use of the singular conditions brought about by the arrival of the Festival to maximize their personal abilities. For years to come, even if the Festival vanished tomorrow, the outback would be peopled by ghouls and wizards, talking animals and sagacious witches. Some people didn’t want to transcend their humanity; a life of routine reassurance was all they craved, and the Festival had deprived them of it. Was that an army greatcoat lurking at the back of the square? A sallow-faced man, half-starved, who in other circumstances Robard would have pegged for a highwayman; here he was just as likely to be the last loyal dregs of a regiment that had deserted en masse. Snap judgments could be treacherous.

  He looked farther. Dust, rising in the distance, perhaps half a mile away. Hmm.

  The grand hallway opened from the front doors and led to the main staircase, the ballroom, and numerous smaller, more discreet destinations. Normally, a manservant would have used a small side entrance. Today, Robard strode in through the huge doors that normally would have welcomed ambassadors and knights of the realm. Nobody watched his dusty progress across the floor, treading dirt into shattered tiles and bypassing the shattered chandelier. He didn’t stop until he reached the entrance to the Star Chamber.

  “—other leg of lamb. Damn your eyes, can’t you knock, man?”

  Robard paused in the doorway. The Admiral was sitting at the Governor’s desk, eating a platter of cold cuts—very cold, preserved meats and pickles from the cellar—with Commander Leonov and two of the other surviving staff officers standing attentively by. “Sir. The revolutionary guards are approaching. We have about five minutes to decide whether to fight or talk. Can I suggest you leave the rest of your meal until after we have dealt with them?”

  Leonov rounded on him. “You bounder, how dare you disturb the Admiral! Get out!”

  Robard raised his left hand and turned it over, revealing the card he held. “Have you ever seen one of these before?”

  Leonov turned white. “I—I—”

  “I don’t have time for this,” Robard said brusquely. To the Admiral; “My lord?”

  Kurtz stared at him with narrowed eyes. “How long?”

  Robard shrugged. “All the time I’ve been with you, my lord. For your own protection. As I was saying, a crowd is moving in our direction from the south bank, over the old bridge. We have about five minutes to decide what to do, but I doubt we will make any friends by shooting at them.”

  Kurtz nodded. “I will go and talk to them, then.”

  Now it was Robard’s turn to stare. “Sir, I believe you should be in a wheelchair, not arguing with revolutionaries. Are you quite sure—”

  “Haven’t felt this good in, oh, about eight years, young feller. The bees around here pack a damned odd sting.”

  “Yes, you could say that. Sir, I believe you may have been compromised. The Festival apparently has access to a wide range of molecular technologies, beyond the one that’s done such a sterling job on your cerebrovascular system. If they wanted—”

  Kurtz raised a hand. “I know. But we’re at their mercy in any event. I will go down to the people and talk. Were any of the crowd old?”

  “No.” Robard puzzled for a moment. “None that I saw. Do you suppose—”

  “A cure for old age is a very common wish,” Kurtz observed. “Dashed slug-a-beds want to be shot by a jealous husband, not a nurse bored with emptying the bedpan. If this Festival has been granting wishes, as our intelligence put it…” He stood up. “Get me my dress uniform, Rob—oh. You, yes you, Kossov. You’re my batman now Robard here outranks you all. And my medals!”

  Leonov, white as a sheet, still hadn’t stopped shaking. “It’s alright,” Robard said sepulchrally. “I don’t usually have people executed for being rude to me.”

  “Sir! Ah—yes, sir! Um, if I may ask—”

  “Ask away.”

  “Since when is an Invigilator of the Curator’s Office required to disguise himself as a manservant?”

  “Since”—Robard pulled out his pocket watch and glanced at it—“about seven years and six months ago, at the request of the Archduke. Really. Nobody notices a servant, you know. And His Excellency—” Kossov returned bearing the trappings of high office. Leonov ushered Robard out onto the landing while the Admiral dressed. “His Excellency is not in direct line to the throne. If you take my meaning.” Leonov did, and his sharp intake of breath—combined with the stress analyzers wired into his auditory nerves—told Robard everything he needed to know. “No, His Majesty had no expectation of a coup; the Admiral is unquestionably loyal. But his personal charisma, fame as a hero of the Republic, and wide popularity, made his personal safety a matter of some importance. We can use him here.”

  “Oh.” Leonov thought for a while. “The revolutionaries?”

  “If he pushes them, they’ll crumble,” Robard said decisively. “All their strongest supporters have long since fled; that’s the nature of a singularity. If they don’t”—he tapped his pocket—“I am licensed to take extraordinary measures in the defense of the Republic, including the use of proscribed technologies.”

  Leonov dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief. “Then it’s all over. You’ll break the revolutionaries by force or by politics, install His Excellency as governor pro tern, and in six months time it will all be over, bar the shouting.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. Even if the woman from Earth was right—and I am inclined to think she was telling the truth about the Festival not being interested in planetary conquest as we understand it, in which case this whole expedition has been a monstrously expensive mistake—we’ve lost two-thirds of the population. We can never get rid of the pernicious virus of bandwidth that they’ve infected this planet with; we may have to abandon the colony, or at the very least institute quarantine procedures. The bloody revolutionaries have won, here, the djinn is well and truly out of the bottle. 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. “O
f 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 insectile 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 pre-Singularity 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 ag
ainst 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.