Iron Sunrise

by Charles Stross

  “That’s okay.” She took his arm and dragged him over to the huge floppy sofa that filled one side of the main room. “What you got in there?”

  He pulled out a bottle. “Sambuca. From Bolivar. And, let’s see, a genuine single malt from Speyside. That’s on Old Earth, you know. And here’s a disgusting chocolate liqueur from somewhere about which the less said the better. Got any glasses?”

  “Yep.” She walked over to the bar and came back with glasses and a jug of ice. She sat down cross-legged at the other side of the sofa and poured a glassful of chocolate liqueur for herself, pretending not to notice Frank’s mock shudder. “You weren’t at dinner.”

  “Those fake formal feast clusterfucks don’t do anything for me,” he announced. “They’re there to make the rich passengers think they’re getting a valuable service—more valuable than traveling deadhead in steerage, anyway. I guess if you do business or are in shipping, you can make a lot of contacts that way, but in general the kind of people I’d like to talk to over a meal don’t travel by liner.” He looked at her sharply. “Enjoy yourself?”

  She nearly took the question at face value, although his tone suggested irony. “I nearly threw up in a plant pot after making a fool of myself.” She winced. “She asked for it, though.”

  “Who did?” Frank raised his glass: “Your health.”

  “Bottoms up. Poisonous toy bitch kept going on about how great being ReMastered was—” She stopped. Frank looked stricken. “Did I say something wrong?” she asked.

  “Was she a blonde? Head half-shaved at one side to show off a tattoo?”

  Wednesday stared at him through a haze of conflicting emotions. “Yes,” she said. “Why?”

  He put his glass down, rattling on the tabletop. “You could have been killed,” he said shakily.

  “What do you—” She leaned toward him. “You said they run Newpeace. Concentration camps, secret police shit. Do you think they’re that dangerous here, though?”

  “They’re dangerous everywhere!” Frank straightened up and picked up his glass, took a hefty mouthful, and coughed for a while. “Never, never, push a ReMastered button. Please? Tell me you won’t do it again?”

  “I was drunk.” Wednesday flushed. His concern was immediate and clear, cutting through the fog of worry. “Hey, I’m not crazy.”

  “Not crazy.” He chuckled edgily. “Is that why you didn’t want to go out on your own?”

  “No. Yes.” She peered at him, wondering why she trusted him. Alone with a gorilla after midnight and he wonders if I’m crazy? “I don’t know. Should I?”

  “You should always know why you do things,” Frank said seriously. “Inviting strange men for a late-night drink, for example.” He picked up the liqueur bottle. “Want a refill? Or should I fuck off now before we both end up with hangovers tomorrow?”

  She pushed her glass toward him. “Stay,” she said impulsively. “I feel safer while you’re around. Couldn’t sleep, anyway.” A faint smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

  as days passed the boredom subsided somewhat. She’d stayed in her room for the whole of the next day, playing with the ship’s extensive games library, but most of the other online players were old hands who had forgotten more about strategy than the entire Magna tournament team. After a while she ventured out, first to see if there really wasn’t anything she could find to wear, then to visit a public bar with Frank. Who introduced her to fresh zero-gee farmed seafood and single malts. Then she’d spent some time with Steffi, who had hastily introduced her to her old friend Sven the clown and made her excuses. Sven, it turned out, also knew Frank: it was a small world aboard ship.

  “So what’s the thing with the face paint about?” she asked Svengali, one late-shift afternoon.

  The clown frowned thoughtfully. “Think caricature. Think parody. Think emphasis on nonverbal communications cues, okay? If this was a virtual, I’d be an avatar with a homunculus-shaped head and body, bright blue nose, and huge kawaii eyes. But it isn’t, and I’m not a surgical basket case, so you have to settle for programmable grease. It’s amazing what it can do to someone’s perception of you—you’d be really surprised.”

  “Probably.” Wednesday took a swig from her glass—something fluorescent green, with red bubbles in it, and about the same alcohol concentration as a strong beer—and pointed at his jacket. “But the double seam—”

  “Not going to leave me any tricks, are you?” Svengali sighed.

  “No,” Wednesday agreed, and the clown pulled a ferocious face. “You’re very good at this,” she said, trying to be conciliatory. “Does it pay a lot?”

  “It pays”—Svengali caught himself—“hey, that’s enough about me. Why don’t we talk about you, for a change?”

  “Uh-huh, you don’t get off the hook that easily.” Wednesday grinned.

  “Yeah, well, it gets hard when the audience is old enough to look behind the mirror. Mutter—”

  “What?”

  Svengali reached toward her head fast, then pulled his hand back to reveal a butterfly fluttering white-and-blue wings inside the cage of his fingers: “—hear me better, now? Or, oh dear, did I just disconnect your brain?” He stared at the butterfly thoughtfully, then blew on it, transforming it into a white mouse.

  “Wow,” said Wednesday sarcastically. “That was really convincing.”

  “Really? Hold out your hand.”

  Wednesday held out her hand, slightly reluctantly, and Svengali released the mouse. “Hey, it’s real!” The mouse, terrified, demonstrated precisely how real it was with a highly accurate rendition of poor bladder control. “Ick. Is that—”

  “Yes.” Before she could drop it, Svengali picked it up by its tail and hid it in his cupped hands. When he opened them a moment later, a butterfly fluttered away.

  “Wow!” Wednesday did a little double take, then frowned at her hand. “Uh. ’Scuse me.”

  “Take your time,” Svengali said magnanimously, leaning back in his chair as she hastily stood up and vanished toward the nearest restroom. His smile widened. “Homing override on,” he told the air in front of him. “Return to base.” The butterfly/mouse ’bot was stowed carefully away in the small case in his pocket long before she returned.

  “Are you going to tell me how you did that?”

  “Nope.”

  “Lawyer!”

  “Am not.” Svengali crossed his arms stubbornly. “Now you tell me how you did that.”

  “What, this?” Her face slowly brightened from turquoise to sky-blue.

  “Yeah, that’s pretty good.”

  “Programmable cosmetic chromatophores.” Her face faded back toward its normal color, except for a touch of ruby on her lips and midnight blue lining on her eyelids. “I had them installed when we moved to Magna.”

  “Uh-huh. Want to take a walk?” asked Svengali, seeing that her glass was nearly empty.

  “Hmm.” She stared at him, then grinned again. “Trying not to let me get too drunk?”

  “It’s my job to look after passengers, not line the sick-bay’s pockets. We can come back for another drink later.”

  “Okay.” She was on her feet. “Where to?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said carelessly. “Let’s just walk. Have you explored the ship yet?”

  Her grin widened. “That would be telling.”

  Gods, but she’s sharp, he told himself. If she’s got the stomach for it, she might even make it in my field. “You’re right—this job doesn’t pay nearly enough,” he grumbled. “I’m supposed to keep you all amused, not be the amusement myself. They should have put an upper age limit on the clientele. Big kids, all of you.” They were already out in the corridor, another high-class hotel passage with sound-deadening carpet, expensively carved wooden paneling, and indirect lights shining on brightly meaningless abstract art installations every few meters. “Nine days. I hate to think what you’re like when you’re bored.”

  “I can keep
to myself.” Wednesday pulled her hands back into the long and elaborately embroidered cuffs of her jacket. “I’m not a child. Well, not everywhere. Legal standards differ.”

  “Yes, yes, and if you’d been born in the New Republic you’d be married with three or four children by now, but that doesn’t mean you’d be an autonomous adult. I’m not supposed to keep an eye on you, I’m supposed to keep you from getting bored. All part of the service. What do you do with yourself when you want some cheap amusement, may I ask, if that isn’t an indelicate question?”

  “Oh, lots of things,” she said idly. Raising an eyebrow at him: “But I don’t think you want to know all the details. Something tells me I’m not your type.”

  “Well whoop-de-do. How perceptive, sister.” Svengali steered them down a side passage then through a door into a conference suite, then out the far side of the room—which doubled as an emergency airlock—and into another passage. “More competition for the boys.” He pulled a comical face. “But seriously. What did you get up to at home when you were bored?”

  “I used to be big on elevator surfing. Vacuum tunneling, too. I was into tai chi, but I sort of let it drop. And, oh, I read spy thrillers.” She glanced around. “We’re not in passenger country anymore, are we?”

  There were no carpets or works of art, the doors were wider and of bare metal, and the ceiling was a flat, emissive glare. “Nope. This is one of the service passages.” Svengali was disappointed at her lack of surprise, but he decided to continue anyway. “They connect all the public spaces. This is a crew lift. They don’t run on cables, they’re little self-powered pressurized vehicles running in the tunnels, and they can change direction at will. You don’t want to try surfing these cars—it’s too dangerous. That”—he pointed at an unmarked narrow door about half a meter high, sized for a small dwarf—“is the service door into a passenger suite. They’re automatically locked while the room’s occupied, but the valet ’bots use them while you’re out and about.”

  “ ’Bots? Like, android amahs?”

  “Who do you think made your bed?” Svengali carried on down the passage. “Human spaces and human furniture are built for roughly human-shaped people. They could put something like an industrial fab in each room, or even make everything out of structured matter, but many people get nervous when they’re too near smart stuff, and having mobile valet ’bots on trolleys is cheaper than providing one per room.”

  “Uh-huh. So you’re telling me that everywhere in the ship is, like, connected to everywhere else? Using old-fashioned doors and passages and ducts?” She was so wide-eyed that he decided it could only be sarcasm.

  “If you design so that it’ll only work with smart-matter utilities, something dumb will happen. That’s the fifteenth corollary of Murphy’s Law, or something. This ship is supposed to be able to get home with just a human crew, you know. That’s partly why people are willing to pay for it.” A side door opened onto a spiral staircase, cobwebby steps of nearly translucent aerogel ascending and descending into a dim blue mist in each direction. “Up or down, m’lady?”

  “Up, first.”

  “You realize we’re only able to do this because I’ve got a badge,” Svengali remarked, as they climbed. The kid had long legs and was in good shape. He had to push himself to keep ahead of her.

  “I guessed.” She snuffled something that might have been a laugh. “It’s still cool. What are those guts for?”

  He followed her finger to the peristaltic pipes in the recess that ran alongside the stairs. “Probably semisolid waste disposal. They can reconfigure this stairwell into a tunnel if there’s a major gravity outage, you know.”

  “Isn’t that unlikely?”

  “Probably.” He carried on climbing for a bit. “Doesn’t it worry you to be climbing a staircase inside what is basically a skyscraper sitting on top of a stasis chamber containing a twenty billion-ton extremal black hole?”

  “I assume”—she paused for breath—“that if anything went wrong with it, it would all be over too fast to worry about.”

  “Probably.” He paused. “That’s why most of the crew—not me, I’m with Entertainments and Diversions, I mean the black gang, engineering ops—are along. In case something goes wrong, and they have to improvise.”

  “Well, isn’t that comforting to know.”

  More sarcasm from Wednesday. It ran off him like water off a duck’s back. “Here we are.”

  “Where?” She gawked past his shoulder at the boringly ordinary-looking door.

  “Here.” He smirked. “The backstage entrance to the live action theater on C deck. Want to see a performance? Or maybe the theater bar?”

  “Wow.” She grinned. “Send in the clowns!”

  With a flourish, Svengali passed her a red nose. Then they went inside.

  preparing for ghosts and dogs

  rachel mansour, commissioner, UN Standing Committee on Interstellar Disarmament (Investigative Branch), walked slowly down the intimidatingly wide steps in front of the building of the Ministry of Cosmic Harmony. Behind her, huge marble columns supported a massive mirror-finished geodesic hemisphere that loomed over the neighborhood like a giant cyborg turtle. A sea of people flooded around her across the Plaza of Public Affairs, office workers and bureaucrats going about their daily work between the offices in the ministry basements, and the scattered subdepartments and public malls at the other side of the open space. The Eastern Palace squatted to her right, a pink-and-white brick mansion that had been converted to a museum to the Hegemony and the people’s revolution that had overturned it more than a century earlier, here in Sarajevo, capital of the planetary empire.

  She felt light-headed, an effect of coming out into the chilly open air after her claustrophobic interview with the subminister in charge of security arrangements for foreign embassies. After twenty-six days aboard the Gloriana, everything from the unprocessed air to the color of daylight seemed peculiar. There was perhaps just a small amount of gravitational adjustment, too—and a head-spinning load of mild culture shock.

  She marched down the steps and out onto the plaza. Vendors selling spiced cocoa drinks, stir-fried octopi, and bootlegged recordings of old public executions tried to attract her attention. She ignored them. He didn’t say no, she thought, remembering the subminister frowning ear to ear behind his desk: he wasn’t very happy. “You are telling me that our security is inadequate?” he’d challenged her.

  “No, I’m telling you that three other diplomatic security corps failed, in series, and two of them were forewarned. Your people might be better, but I hope you’ll forgive me for not taking it on trust.”

  “Go ahead with your scheme, then, if the Muscovites agree. We will of course deny all knowledge if it goes wrong.”

  It was a step up from what she’d have gotten a generation ago, but New Dresden wasn’t that bad. They had learned the enlightened self-interest meme here, and picked up the idea of a loyal opposition. They even elected their government officials, these days, although in this city the Party maintained its hereditary veto. All told, New Dresden was more civilized than many places she could have ended up. Less so than some others—but so what? As long as they follow their best interests. And don’t go haring off into the darkness again, like they did seventy years ago. Still, maybe it would be for the best if she kept Martin out of the frame. She’d have to text him via the embassy channel. She tugged her jacket tighter across her shoulders, trying to think her way into the mind of the bureaucratic herd in their dark, closely tailored uniforms. But she couldn’t fool herself about the subminister’s likely report to his bosses.

  People didn’t always follow their best interests. Human beings were distressingly bad at risk analysis, lousy with hidden motivations and neuroses, anything but the clean rational actors that economists or diplomats wanted so desperately to believe in, and diplomats had to go by capabilities, not intentions. In dealing with the Muscovite diplomats in residence the Party officials must feel as if they w
ere handling a hungry and aroused venomous snake, one that could turn on them and bite at any moment. They’d tolerate George Cho playing his little shell game with Ambassador Morrow for precisely as long as it increased the likelihood of Morrow’s issuing the recall code, and not a second longer.

  Speaking of whom, the Ambassador—easily identifiable by the two bodyguards—was sitting at a table at the pavement restaurant. Rachel walked round to the kitchen side then marched up to the nearest bodyguard—who was focusing on the square, not on the waiters approaching from the restaurant entrance—and tapped him on the shoulder. “Rachel Mansour, to see the Honorable Elspeth Morrow.”

  The bodyguard jumped. “Whoa!”

  Morrow looked up, her face colorless and her expression bored. “You’re late. George Cho said I should talk to you. Strongly implied that I needed to talk to you. Who are you?”

  Rachel pulled out a chair and sat down. “I work for the same people as George. Different department, though. Officially, I’m on protocol. Unofficially, I’ll deny everything.” She smiled faintly.

  Morrow waved at the chair with poor grace. “Okay, spook. So, what does George want?”

  Rachel leaned back, then glanced at the bodyguard. “You know about the, ah, problem that concerns us.” She studied Morrow intently, seeing a slim woman, evidently in her early forties. Moscow hadn’t been good at antiaging therapy, but she could easily have been twenty years older. She wore her chestnut hair shoulder-length, and her green eyes seemed haunted by . . . just haunted. There had to be hundreds of millions of ghosts already riding at her shoulder, and the knowledge that she could add to their ranks—What must that do to her? Rachel wondered. “Forgive me for asking, but did you know Maureen Davis, Simonette Black, or Maurice Pendelton well?” she asked.

  Morrow nodded. “Maurice was an old friend,” she said slowly. “I didn’t know Black other than by repute. Maureen . . . we knew each other. But Maurice is the one I feel for.” She leaned forward. “What do you know about this?” she asked quietly. “Why did George bring you? You’re black ops, aren’t you?”