Another strange couple took over a tenement above Markus Wolff’s old hardware store. They didn’t talk much, but the bearded man demonstrated a remarkable aptitude with tools. Together they rebuilt the store, then opened for business. They kept a small stock of locks and clocks and rebuilt telephones and more exotic gadgets, racked in the age-blackened oak cabinets within the shop. These they traded for food and clothing and coal, and tongues wagged about the source of the miraculous toys that they sold so cheap—items that would have cost a fortune in the capital of the father world, never mind a backwoods colonial town. The supply seemed never-ending, and the sign they hung from the shop front was daringly close to subversive: ACCESS TO TOOLS AND IDEAS. But this didn’t provoke as much comment as the conduct of his partner; a tall, thin woman with dark hair cut short, who sometimes went about bareheaded and unaccompanied, and frequently ran the shop when her husband was absent, even serving strangers on her own.
Back before the Festival, their conduct would have been sure to arouse comment, perhaps even a visit by the police and a summons to the Curator’s Office. But in these strange times, nobody seemed to care: and the radical Rubenstein was a not-infrequent visitor to their shop, procuring interesting components for his printing mechanism. They evidently had dangerous friends, and this was enough to deter the neighbors from snooping too much—except for the widow Lorenz, who seemed to feel it was her duty to pick a quarrel with the woman (who she suspected of being a Jewess, or unwed, or something equally sinister).
Over the nine months following the Festival, summer slid into the cold, rainy depths of autumn: the sun hid its face, and winter settled its icy grip into the ground. Martin spent many evenings rooting through the supply of metal bar stock he’d collected during the summer, feeding pieces to the small fabricator in the cellar, trying his hand at toolmaking with the primitive mechanical equipment to hand. Diamond molds, electric arc furnace, numerically controlled milling machine—these, his tools, he spun from the fabricator, using them in turn to make artifacts that the farmers and shopkeepers around him could understand.
While Martin worked at these tasks, Rachel kept house and shop together, rooted out clothing and food, bought advertising space in Rubenstein’s broadsheet, and kept her ears to the ground for signs of trouble. They lived together as man and wife, meeting nosy neighborly inquiries with a blank stare and a shrug meaning mind your own business. Life was primitive, their resources and comfort limited both by what was available and by the exigencies of leading an inconspicuous existence; although after winter began to bite, Martin’s installation of insulating foam and heat pumps kept them so warm that one or two of the more daring neighbors developed an unwelcome tendency to hang around the shop.
One chilly morning, Martin awoke with a headache and a dry mouth. For a moment he couldn’t recall where he was: he opened his eyes and looked up at a dingy white curtain. Someone murmured sleepily and rolled against him. How did I get here? This isn’t my shop. This isn’t my life—the sense of alienation was profound. Then memory came sluicing back like a flash flood, damping down the dusty plains. He rolled over and reached out an arm, hugged her sleeping shoulders against his chest. Distant emitters twittered to the back of his head: all the wards were in place. Rachel muttered and twitched, yawning. “Awake?” he asked softly.
“Yeah. Ah. What time is it?” She blinked against the morning light, hair tousled and eyes puffy with sleep, and a stab of affection thrilled through him.
“After dawn. Bloody cold out here. ’Scuse me.” He hugged her once, then slid feet first through the bed-curtains, out into the frigid bedroom. The frost had scrawled its runes inside the windowpanes. Trying to keep his feet off the wooden floor, he twitched on his felt slippers then pulled out the chamber pot and squatted. He pulled on chilly outerwear from the clothes-line inside the canopy bed, then went down into the cellar to inspect the charcoal burner that still glowed, peltier cells generating power for the small manufacturing plant’s overnight milling run. Draw water, boil it, and soon they’d have coffee—a miraculous luxury, notwithstanding that it was ersatz, produce of a cornucopia machine. Maybe in a week or two the geothermal tap would be providing a bit more heat; for now, any temperature above freezing was a win in the face of the fierce steppe winter.
Rachel was up, floor creaking underfoot, yawning as she pulled on her chemise and underskirts. He stomped downstairs to rake out the oven and light a new fire; his hands were too cold, and he rubbed them hard to get the circulation going. Morning market, isn’t it? He thought. Lots of farmers. Maybe make some sales. Then he almost pinched himself. What am I turning into? Cold ashes tumbling into a tin bucket as he scraped behind the fire grate. Something rustled behind him. He glanced around. Rachel was clad for outdoors: her voluminous brown dress covered her to the soles of her boots, and she’d tied her hair up in a head scarf, knotted tightly under her chin after the local fashion. Only her face was exposed. “You going out?” he asked.
“Market this morning. I want to buy some bread, maybe a chicken or two. They’re not going to be so easy to come by if we leave it any longer.” She glanced away. “Brr. Cold today, isn’t it?”
“We should be warming up in here by the time you get back.” He finished laying coals in the grate and used a small, familiar piece of magic: light blossomed fast, spread hungrily across the anthracite surfaces. He turned his back to the oven. “Should be a lot of sales today. Money—”
“I’ll draw some from the till.” She leaned close, and he wrapped his arms around her. Reassuring and solid, embedded within the guise of a local artisan’s wife. She leaned her chin on his shoulder with long familiarity.
“You’re looking good this morning. Wonderful.”
She smiled a little, and shivered. “Flatterer. I wonder how much longer we’re going to be able to stay here?”
“Be able to? Or have to?”
“Um.” She considered for a moment. “Is it getting to you?”
“Yes. A bit.” He chuckled quietly. “I caught myself thinking like a shopkeeper this morning, while I was cleaning out the grate. It’d be so easy to slip into a routine. It’s what, eight months now? Living the quiet life. I could almost see us settling down here, raising a family, sinking into obscurity.”
“It wouldn’t work.” She tensed under his hands, and he rubbed at her shoulders. “We wouldn’t age right. They’ll open up travel again in the new year, and then, well. I’ve done child rearing, too. It wouldn’t work, trust me. Be glad of that reversible vasectomy. Or had you thought what it’d be like to be on the run with a baby in tow?”
“Oh, I know about that.” He carried on moving his hands in small circles until she relaxed slightly. Thick fabric moved under his fingertips, many layers of it against the cold. “I know. We need to move on, sooner rather than later. It’s just so . . . quiet. Peaceful.”
“Graveyards are quiet, too.” She pulled back to arm’s length and stared at him, and once again he held his breath: because when she did this, he found her unbearably beautiful. “That’s what the New Republic is all about, isn’t it? This isn’t a good place to live, Martin. It isn’t safe. The town’s in shock; collectively they’re all in a fit of denial. All their wishes granted, for three months, and it wasn’t enough! When they wake up, they’ll reach for the security blanket. The place will be crawling with Curator’s Office informers, and this time you don’t have an Admiralty contract and I don’t have a diplomatic passport. We’ll have to move on.”
“And your employers—” He couldn’t continue.
“Easy come, easy go.” She shrugged. “I’ve taken leave of absence before. This isn’t leave; it’s lying low, waiting to exit a hot zone. But if we could only make it back to Earth, there are lots of things I’d like to do with you. Together. There’ll be room to make plans, then. Here, if we stay, someone else will plan everything for us. Along with everybody else.”
“Alright.” He turned back to the cooker: a healthy red glow rippl
ed beneath the coals that the adiabatic heater had goosed into combustion. “Today, the market. Maybe this evening we can think about when to—”
There was a pounding at the front door.
“What is it?” Martin shouted. Leaving the stove, he shambled through into the cold, dark shop: paused at the door. Opened the letterbox. “Who’s there?”
“Telegram!” piped a breathless voice. “Telegram for Master Springburg!”
With a rattle of bolts, Martin slid the door ajar. Blinding white snow, and a red-uniformed post office runner boy who stood staring up at him. “Telegram? For the toolsmith?”
“That’d be me,” he said. The boy waited: Martin fumbled for a tip, a few kopecks, then closed the door and leaned against it, heart pounding. A telegram!
“Open it!” Rachel loomed over him, eyes anxious with hope and surprise. “Who is it from?”
“It’s from Herman—” he opened the envelope and, mouth dry, began to read aloud:
TO: MARTIN SPRINGFIELD AND RACHEL MANSOUR,
CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR BABY.
I UNDERSTAND THE CHILD WAS BORN IN ORBIT AROUND ROCHARD’S WORLD, AND SHORTLY DEPARTED IN VARIOUS DIRECTIONS. WHILE I APPRECIATE THAT YOU ARE BOTH TIRED, YOU MIGHT BE INTERESTED TO KNOW THAT I HAVE AN IMPORTANT BUSINESS VENTURE OPENING BACK HOME. IF YOU’D LIKE TO BE INVOLVED, TWO TICKETS ARE WAITING FOR YOU AT THE CENTRAL POST OFFICE IN NOVY PETROGRAD.
PS: I GATHER SPRING IS AN UNHEALTHY SEASON IN PLOTSK. PLEASE DON’T TARRY.
Later that day, the old Wolff hardware store caught fire and burned down to the ground—the victim, local rumor had it, of neglect by its feckless owner. He had last been seen leaving town in a hired sleigh, accompanied by his fancy woman and a small carpetbag. They were never seen again in Plotsk, but vanished into the capital city like a drop of ink in the blue ocean: lost in the turbulence and excitement surrounding the arrival of the first civilian starship since the Festival departed, a tramp freighter from Old Calais.
They weren’t really lost: but that, as they say, is another story. And before I recount it, I have some wishes I would like you to grant me . . .
About the Author
CHARLES STROSS is a full-time writer who was born in Leeds, England, in 1964. He studied in London and Bradford, gaining degrees in pharmacy and computer science, and has worked in a variety of jobs, including pharmacist, technical author, software engineer, and freelance journalist. Visit his website at www.antipope.org/charlie/index.html.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
the gathering storm
preparations for departure
the spacelike horizon
the admiral’s man
wolf depository incident
telegram from the dead
a semiotic war
confessions
diplomatic behavior
invitation to an execution
circus of death
bouncers
jokers
the telephone repairman
delivery service
epilogue
About the Author
Singularity Sky Page 38