Iron Sunrise s-2

by Charles Stross

  The trees came to an end, and the path began to descend toward a concrete underpass that slid beneath the road that separated park from town center. If you could call it a town center, these days. First there’d been a small rural village. Then there’d been a battle. Then there’d been another village, which grew into a town before the next battle flattened it. Then the town had been rebuilt and turned into a city, which had been bombed heavily and rebuilt again. Then the Mall that Ate Vondrak had turned into the Arcology that Absorbed Vondrak, all concrete towers and gleaming glassy Penrose-tiled roof, a groundscraper sprawled across the landscape like a sleeping giant. The place was heavily contaminated by history, war memorials marking off the worst pollution hot spots.

  It was a quiet day, but there was still some traffic and a few people about at ground level even that early in the morning — a couple out for an early-morning run together, three kids on walksters, an old woman with a huge backpack, worn boots, and the wiry look of a hiker poring over an archaic moving map display. A convoy of local delivery vans hummed past on the road deck, nestling behind their long-haul tractor like a queue of ducklings. A seagull, surprisingly far inland, circled overhead, raucously claiming its territory.

  “When’s the next train to Potrobar?” he asked aloud.

  “You have twenty-nine minutes. Options: Make a reservation. Display route to station. Rescan—”

  “Reservation and route, please.” The ubiquitous geocomputing network there was crude compared to the varied services on Earth, but it did the job, and did it without inserting animated advertorials, which was a blessing. A light path flickered into view in front of him, strobing toward one of the arcology entrances. Frank followed it across the ornamental cobblestones, past a gaggle of flocking unicyclists and a fountain containing a diuretic-afflicted Eros.

  The train station was on level six, a glazed atrium with sliding doors along one side to give access to the passenger compartments. Frank was slouched in a seat, pecking at his keyboard in a desultory manner (trying to capture the atmosphere of a chrome-and-concrete station was like trying to turn a burned lump of charcoal back into a tree, he thought dispiritedly) when his phone bleeped for attention. “Yeah?” he asked, keeping to voice-only — too easy for someone to snatch his window/camera in this crowded place.

  “Frank? It’s me. I’m here. Where are you?”

  “You’re—” His eyes crossed with the unexpected mental effort of trying to figure it out, then he hit on the caller’s geocache location. “Eh. What do you want, Wednesday?”

  “I’ve, uh, I’ve only just got off the ship, but I was wondering, are you busy this evening?” It came out in a rush. “See, there’s this wine-and-cheese reception thingy, and I’ve been invited to it, says I can bring a guest, and I haven’t done one of these things before, but I have been strongly advised to go—”

  Frank tried not to sigh. “I’ve just had an interview fall through. If I can’t refill the slot, I guess I might be free, but probably not. Just what kind of do is it?”

  “It’s some kind of fifth-anniversary dead light get-together, a reunion for any Moscow citizens who’re on Dresden. At the embassy, you know? My, uh, friends said you might be interested.”

  Frank sat bolt upright, barely noticing the other commuters on the platform, as they began to move toward the doors. “Wait, that’s excellent!” he said excitedly. “I was wanting to get some local color. Maybe get some interview slots with ordinary people. When is it, you said—” The doors were opening as passengers disembarked: others moved to take their place.

  “The Muscovite high consulate in Sarajevo. Tonight at—”

  Frank started. The platform was emptying fast, and the train was waiting. “Whoa! Mail me? Got to catch a train. Bye.” He hung up fast and trotted over to the doors, stepping aboard just as the warning beeper went off.

  “Potrobar?” he muttered to himself, glancing around for an empty seat. “Potrobar? What the fuck am I going there for?” He sighed, and forced himself to sit down as the PA system gave a musical chime and the train lifted from the track bed and began to slide toward the tube entrance. “When’s the next train from Potrobar to Sarajevo?” he asked plaintively.

  SET US UP THE BOMB

  Ring ring. “Hey! what took you so long? I’ve been waiting for hours! I’m going to be late—”

  “You are not late. There will be another capsule in less than half an hour, Wednesday. Did you receive my message about the reception?”

  “Yes.” Wednesday sighed theatrically. “I’m on my way there. Will you tell me what this is all about?”

  There was a momentary pause. “In due course.”

  Wednesday shook her head. “In other words, no.” She bent down and buckled up her boots. They looked really fine with the white lacy shalwar trousers she’d bought for dinner and never worn. “So what’s the point of me going there?”

  “There is going to be trouble,” said Herman, his voice a distant monotone. The conspirators who are currently assassinating Muscovite diplomats—”

  “What?”

  “—Please do not interrupt. Did you think you were the only target?”

  “But, but—”

  “The chancelleries of a hundred worlds will be shaken by the exposure of this conspiracy, Wednesday. If the primary annealing state vector collapses to — excuse me. If the outcome I am betting against myself on comes to pass. I apologize, human languages are poor vehicles for describing temporal paradoxes.”

  “You’re going to have to try harder if you want to impress. I’m just an airhead party animal, me.”

  “Just so.” Pause. “Attend. Three ambassadors have been murdered. Their deaths coincide with the arrival of this ship in orbit around whichever planet they were on at the time. On this planet, there is an ambassador, and another senior government official. The reasons I brought you here are threefold. Firstly, I am interested in knowing who is killing these diplomats, and why, because I believe it will answer a very important question — who destroyed Moscow.” There was another brief pause. “Backward chaining from the resolution of that situation, I must have sent a message to my earlier state vector — acting in my capacity as an ex-officio oracle and deity within the light cone — to pick you up at an early age. Your involvement was implicit in the development of this situation, although I don’t yet fully understand why, and I believe the reason the faction of the assassins tried to kill you is connected. The information you stumbled across on Old Newfie was more important than I realized at the time. Unfortunately, unless I can arrange transport there for you, it may not be easy to retrieve it.”

  “You want to take me back home?” It came out as a squeak. Wednesday stood up hastily: “You didn’t say anything about that! Isn’t it dangerous? How will we get there—”

  “That was the second reason,” Herman continued implacably. “My third reason is this: I am a distributed intelligence service, linked by causal channels. I am highly dependent on state coherency that can only be maintained within the light cone — whenever the ship that is the focus of my attention makes an FTL transit, I lose contact. You are my reset switch. You are also my blind spot coverage. If I am inaccessible when critical events occur, you are sufficiently intelligent and resourceful that, if adequately informed, you can act as my proxy aboard ship. Now. Are you ready?”

  “Ready for—” Wednesday took a deep breath. “What am I meant to be ready for?” she asked, her voice puzzled and slightly worried. “Is it going to be dangerous?” She pulled on her jacket (which she had dilated to an ankle-skimming coat, showy but thin and useless against the elements).

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, how nice.” Wednesday pulled a face. “Is there anything else?”

  “Yes. You should be aware of several things. Firstly, there is another human agent of mine involved in this situation. His name is Martin Springfield. You can trust him implicitly if you meet him. He is acting as my unofficial liaison with another diplomatic element th
at is investigating the situation — more or less on the same side. Secondly, I owe you an apology.”

  “An—” Wednesday stopped dead. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked suspiciously.

  “I failed to prevent the destruction of your home world. I am worried, Wednesday. Preventing incidents like that is the purpose of my — this component’s — existence. A failure to do so suggests a failure of my warning mechanisms. A failure of intelligence on my part suggests that the entities responsible for the destruction of Moscow are far more powerful than previously realized. Or are agencies of such an entity.”

  Wednesday leaned against the wall. “What? But you’re the Eschaton!”

  “Not quite. It is true that I am a component of the ensemble intelligence referred to as the Eschaton.” Herman’s voice had gone very flat, as if to emphasize the fact that any color in its tone was simply a modulation trick. “The Eschaton preserves global causality within a realm approximately a thousand parsecs in radius. It does so by recursively transmitting information back in time to itself, which is used to allow it to edit out temporal anomalies. Such temporal paradoxes are an inevitable side effect of permitting faster-than-light travel, or of operating an ensemble intelligence employing timelike logic mechanisms. I receive orders from deep time and execute them knowing that in doing so I ensure that the descendant state vector is going to exist long enough to issue those orders. If I do not receive such orders, then it may be that the events are not observable by me. Or my future state vector. This situation may occur if the Eschaton is disrupted or edited out of the future of this time-line. I am advising you, Wednesday, that I should have prevented the destruction of Moscow. That I failed to do so raises questions over my future survival.”

  “Oh fuck! You’re telling me—”

  “There appears to be a complex play in progress against me, executed by a party or parties unknown. I revise my previous estimate that the threat was emergent from the ReMastered. Their desire to destroy me is well understood, as are their capabilities, and countermeasures have been in place for some time. This threat emerges from a higher realm. The possibility of a hostile Eschaton-equivalent intelligence existing in the future of this light cone must now be considered. It is possible that a ReMastered faction is being manipulated by such an external entity. My ability to project ahead has therefore been called into question. Fallback logic modules employing neo-Bayesian reasoning suggest that when you return to the ship they will send a team of agents after you, but this is a purely speculative assumption. You must be on your guard at all times. Your job is to draw out the hostile proxies and expose them to me, starting at the embassy memorial ceremony. If you fail, the consequences could be far worse than the destruction of a single planet.”

  Click. “Oh shit.” For a moment she thought she was going to be all right, but then her stomach twisted. She barely made it to the bathroom in time, holding back the dry heaves until she was over the toilet bowl. Why me? How did I end up in this mess? she asked the mirror, sniffing and trying to dry her eyes. It’s like some kind of curse!

  Fifty minutes later, it was a shaken but more composed Wednesday who climbed the two steps down from the space elevator capsule into a concrete-and-steel arrivals hall, presented her passport to the immigration official, and staggered blinking into the late-afternoon sunlight on New Dresden.

  “Wow,” she said softly.

  Her rings vibrated for attention. She sighed. “Cancel block.”

  “Are you feeling less stressed?” asked Herman, as if nothing had happened.

  “I think so.”

  “Good. Now please pay attention to where we are going. I am adding your destination to the public geotracking system. Follow the green dot.”

  “Green dot — okay.” A green dot appeared on the floor, and Wednesday followed it passively, feeling drained and depressed. She’d almost psyched herself into looking forward to the reception, but Herman’s news had unhinged her again, bringing her tenuous optimism crashing down. Maybe Frank would be able to cheer her up, but just then she wanted only to go back to her luxury suite and lock the door and get stinking drunk.

  It took another three hours of boredom, dozing in the seats of a maglev capsule hurtling at thousands of kilometers per hour through an evacuated tunnel buried deep under oceans and continents, before she arrived in the capital. Typical, why couldn’t they build the beanstalk closer to the main city? Or move the city? she sniffed to herself. Getting around on a planet seemed to take a very long time, for no obvious reason.

  Sarajevo was old, with lots of stone buildings and steel-and-glass skyscrapers.

  It was badly air-conditioned, with strange eddying breezes and air currents and a really disorienting, upsetting blue-and-white fractal plasma image in place of a decent ceiling. It was also full of strange-looking people in weird clothes moving fast and doing incomprehensible things. She passed three women in fake peasant costume — New Dresden had never been backward enough to have a real peasantry — waving credit terminals. A bunch of people in rainbow-colored luminous plastic gowns roller-bladed past, surrounded by compact remotes buzzing around at ear level. Cars, silent and melted-looking, slunk through the streets. A fellow in grimy ripped technical mountaineering gear, bubble tent folded at his feet, seemed to be offering her an empty ceramic coffee cup. People in glowing glasses gesticulated at invisible interfaces; laser dots all over the place danced ahead of people who needed guidance. It wasn’t like Septagon, it was like -

  It’s like home. If home had been bigger and brasher and more developed, she realized, tenuously making a connection to her memories of their last family visit to Grandma’s house.

  One thing pricked her attention: it was the lack of difference. She’d been worried at first about going down-well wearing a party costume she’d have been comfortable with back home. “Don’t worry,” Herman told her. “Moscow and Dresden are both McWorlds — the original colonists had similar backgrounds and aspirations. The culture will feel familiar to you. You can thank media diffusion for that; it will not be like the New Republic, or Turku, or even as different as Septagon.” And indeed, it wasn’t. Even the street signs looked the same.

  “And we were nearly at war with these people?” she asked.

  “The usual stupid reasons. Competitive trade advantage, immigration policy, political insecurity, cheap slow transport — cheap enough to facilitate trade, too expensive to facilitate federalization or the other adjustments human nations make to minimize the risk of war. The McWorlds all took something from the dominant terrestrial globalized culture with them when they were settled, but they have diverged since then — in some cases, radically. Do not make the mistake of assuming you can discuss politics or actions of the government safely here.”

  “As if I would.” Wednesday followed her green dot round a corner and up a spiraling ramp onto a road-spanning walkway, then into a roofed-over mall. “Where am I supposed to be meeting Frank?”

  “He should be waiting for you. Along this road. There.”

  He was sitting on a bench in front of an abstract bronze sculpture, rattling away on his antique keyboard. Killing time. “Frank, are you okay?”

  He looked up at her and pulled a face — a grimace that might have been intended as a smile but succeeded in doing nothing to reassure her. His eyes were red-rimmed and had bags under them, and his clothing looked as if he’d been living in it for a couple of days. “I, I think so.” He shook his head. “Brr.” He yawned widely. “Haven’t slept for a long, uh…” He trailed off.

  Party overload, she thought dispassionately. She reached out and took his hand, tugging. “Come on!”

  Frank lurched to his feet and caught his balance. The keyboard concertinaed away into a pocket. He yawned again. “Are we in time?”

  She blinked, checking her timepiece: “Sure!” she said brightly. “What have you been doing?”

  “Not sleeping.” Frank shook himself. “I’m a mess. Mind if I freshen up firs
t?” He looked almost apologetic.

  She grinned at him. “That looks like a public toilet over there.”

  “Okay. Two minutes.”

  He took nearer to a quarter of an hour, but when he returned he’d had a shower and run his outerwear through a fastcleaner. “Sorry ’bout that. Do I look better?”

  “You look fine,” she said diplomatically. “At least, you’ll pass. Are you going to fall over on me?”

  “Nope.” He dry swallowed a capsule and shuddered slightly. “Not until we get back to the ship.” He tapped the pocket with his keyboard in it. “Captured enough color for three features, interviewed four midlevel government officials and six random civilians, grabbed about four hours of full-motion. One last push and—” This time his smile looked less stressed.

  “Okay, let’s go.” She took his hand again and led him along the street.

  “You know where we’re going? The embassy reception hall?”

  “Never been there.” She pointed at the floor. “Got a guide.”

  “Oh good, tell everyone where we’re going,” he muttered. “I just hope they don’t mistake me for a vagrant.”

  “An, uh, what? What was that?”

  “A vagrant?” He raised an eyebrow at her. “They don’t have them where you come from? Lucky.”

  She checked the word in her lexicon. “I’ll tell them you’re my guest,” she said, and patted his hand. Having Frank around made her feel safe, like walking through a strange town with a huge and ferocious guard dog — the biological kind — to protect her. Her spirits rose as they neared the embassy.

  Embassies were traditionally the public representatives of a nation abroad. As such, they tended to be built with a swagger, gratuitously broad facades and conspicuously gilded flagpoles. The Muscovite embassy was typical of the breed, a big, classically styled limestone-and-marble heap squatting sullenly behind a row of poplar trees, a discreet virtual fence, and a lawn that appeared to have been trimmed with a micrometer gauge and nail scissors. But something about it wasn’t quite right. It might have been the flag out front — set to half-mast ever since the dreadful day, years ago, when the diplomatic causal channel went dead — or something more subtle. There was a down-at-heel air to it, of retired gentry keeping up appearances but quietly living beyond their means.