“I think—” He paused again and looked away, slightly evasively. “If the Eschaton intervenes, we’re both in the wrong place.”
“Huh. That’s so much fun to know.” She forced a grin. “So where do you come from? Go on, I told you—”
Martin stretched his arms and leaned back. “I grew up in a Yorkshire hill farming village, all goats and cloth caps and dark satanic mills full of God-knows-what. Oh yes, and compulsory ferret-legging down the pub on Tuesday evenings, for the tourist trade tha‘ knows.”
“Ferret-legging?” Rachel looked at him incredulously.
“Yup. You tie your kilt up around your knees with duct tape—as you probably know, no Yorkshireman would be seen dead wearing anything under his sporran—and take a ferret by the scruff of his neck. A ferret, that’s like, uh, a bit like a mink. Only less friendly. It’s a young man’s initiation rite; you stick the ferret where the sun doesn’t shine and dance the furry dance to the tune of a balalaika. Last man standing and all that, kind of like the ancient Boer aardvark-kissing competition.” Martin shuddered dramatically. “I hate ferrets. The bloody things bite like a cask-strength single malt without the nice after-effects.”
“That was what you did on Tuesdays,” Rachel said, slowly beginning to smile. “Tell me more. What about Wednesdays?”
“Oh, on Wednesdays we stayed home and watched reruns of Coronation Road. They remixed the old video files to near-realistic resolution and subtitled them, of course, so we could understand what they were saying. Then we’d all hoist a pint of Tetley’s tea and toast the downfall of the House of Lancaster. Very traditional, us Yorkshirefolk. I remember the thousandth-anniversary victory celebrations—but that’s enough about me. What did you do on Wednesdays?”
Rachel blinked. “Nothing in particular. Defused terrorist A-bombs, got shot at by Algerian Mormon separatists. Uh, that was after I kicked over the traces the first time. Before then, I think I took the kids to soccer, although I’m not sure what day of the week that was.” She turned aside for a moment and rummaged in the steamer trunk under her bunk. “Ah, here it is.” She pulled out a narrow box and opened it. “You know what? Maybe you shouldn’t have used that sober patch.” The bottle gleamed golden beneath the antiseptic cabin lights.
“I’d be lousy company though. I was getting all drunk and depressed on my own, and you had to interrupt me and make me sober up.”
“Well, maybe you should just have tried to find someone to get drunk with instead of doing it on your own.” Two small glasses appeared. She leaned close. “Do you want it watered?”
Martin eyed the bottle critically. Replicated Speyside fifty-year malt, a cask-strength bottling template. If it wasn’t a nanospun clone of the original, it would be worth its weight in platinum. Even so, it would be more than adequately drinkable. “I’ll take it neat and report to sick bay for a new throat tomorrow.” He whistled appreciatively as she poured a generous measure. “How did you know?”
“That you’d like it?” She shrugged. “I didn’t. I just grew up on corn liquor. Didn’t meet the real thing till a job in Syrtis—” Her face clouded over. “Long life and happiness.”
“I’ll drink to that,” he agreed after a moment. They sat in silence for a minute, savoring the afterbloom of the whisky. “I’d be happier right now if I knew what was going on, though.”
“I wouldn’t be too worried: either nothing, or we’ll be dead too fast to feel it. The carrier from Septagon will probably just make a fast pass to reassure itself that we’re not planning on spreading any more mayhem, then escort us to the next jump zone while the diplomats argue over who pays. Right now, I’ve got the comms room taking my name in vain for all it’s worth; hopefully, that’ll convince them not to shoot at us without asking some more questions first.”
“I’d be happier if I knew we had a way off this ship.”
“Relax. Drink your whisky.” She shook her head. “We don’t. So stop worrying about it. Anyway, if they do shoot us, wouldn’t you rather die happily sipping a good single malt or screaming in terror?”
“Has anyone ever told you you’re cold-blooded? No, I take it back. Has anyone ever told you you’ve got a skin like a tank?”
“Frequently.” She stared into her glass thoughtfully. “It’s a learned thing. Pray you never have to learn it.”
“You mean you had to?”
“Yes. No other way to do my job. My last job, that is.”
“What did you do?” he asked softly.
“I wasn’t joking about the terrorist A-bombs. Actually, the bombs were the easiest bit; it was finding the assholes who planted them that was the hard part. Find the asshole, find the gadget, fix the gadget, fix the dump they sprang the plute from. Usually in that order, unless we were unlucky enough to have to deal with an unscheduled criticality excursion in downtown wherever without someone mailing in a warning first. Then if we found the asshole, our hardest job would be keeping the lynch mob away from them until we could find out where they sourced the bang-juice.”
“Did you ever lose any?” he asked, even more quietly.
“You mean, did I ever fuck up and kill several thousand people?” she asked. “Yes—”
“No, that’s not what I meant.” He reached for her free hand gently. “I know where you’ve been. Any job I do—if it doesn’t work, somebody pays. Possibly hundreds or thousands of somebodies. That’s the price of good engineering; nobody notices you did your job right.”
“Nobody’s actually trying to stop you doing your job,” she challenged.
“Oh, you’d be surprised.”
The tension in her shoulders ebbed. “I’m sure you’ve got a story about that, too. You know, for someone who’s no good at dealing with people, you’re not bad at being a shoulder to cry on.”
He snorted. “And for someone who’s a failure at her job you’re doing surprisingly well so far.” He let go of her hand and rubbed the back of her neck. “But I think you could do with a massage. You’re really tense. Got a headache yet?”
“No,” she said, slightly reluctantly. Then she took another sip of her whisky. The glass was nearly empty now. “But I’m open to persuasion.”
“I know three ways to die happy. Unfortunately, I’ve never tried any of them. Care to join me?”
“Where did you hear about them?”
“At a seance. It was a good seance. Seriously, though. Dr. Springfield prescribes another dose of Speyside life-water, then a lie down and a neck massage. Then, even if the many-angled ones decide to come in shooting, at least fifty percent of us get to die happy. How’s that sound?”
“Fine.” She smiled tiredly and reached for the bottle, ready to top his glass up. “But you know something? You were right about the not knowing. You can get used to it, but it doesn’t get any easier. I wish I knew what they were thinking…”
Bronze bells tolled on the bridge of the Fleet attack carrier Neon Lotus. Incense smoldered in burners positioned above air inlet ducts; beyond the ornate gold-chased pillars marking the edges of the room, the brilliant jewels of tracking glyphs streamed past against a backdrop consisting of infinite darkness. Shipboard Facilities Coordinator Ariadne Eldrich leaned back in her chair and contemplated the blackness of space. She stared intently at the cluster of glyphs that intersected her vector close to the center of the wall. “Cultureless fools. Just what did they think they were doing?”
“Thinking probably had very little to do with it,” Interdictor Director Marcus Bismarck noted drily. “Our Republican neighbors seem to think that too much mind-work rots the brain.”
Eldrich snorted. “Too true.” A smaller cloud of diadems traced a convergent path through the void behind the New Republican battle squadron; a wing of antimatter-powered interceptors, six hours out from the carrier and accelerating on a glare of hard gamma radiation at just under a thousand gees. Their crew—bodies vitrified, minds uploaded into their computational matrices—watched the intruders, coldly alert for any sign of ac
tive countermeasures, a prelude to attack. “But who did they think they were shooting at?”
A new voice spoke up. “Can’t be sure, but they say they’re at war.” A soft soprano, Chu Melinda, shipboard liaison with the Public Intelligence Organization. “They say they mistook the mining tugs for enemy interceptors. Although what enemy they expected to meet on our turf—”
“I thought they weren’t talking directly to us?” asked Bismarck.
“They aren’t, but they’ve got a halfway-sensible diplomatic expert system along. Says it’s a UN observer and authenticates as, uh, a UN observer. It vouches for their incompetence, so unless the Capitol wants to go accusing the UN of lying, we’d better take it at face value. Confidence factor is point-eight plus, anyway.”
“Why’d they give it access to their shipboard comms net?”
“Who but the Eschaton knows? Only, I note with interest that all but one of those craft was built in a Solar shipyard.”
“I can’t say I’m best pleased.” Eldrich stared at the screen moodily. The ship sensed some of her underlying mood: a target selection cursor ghosted briefly across the enemy glyphs, locking grasers onto the distant projected light cones of the enemy flotilla. “Still. As long as we can keep them from doing any more damage. Any change in their jump trajectory?”
“None yet,” Chu commented. “Still heading for SPD-47. Why would anybody want to go there, anyway? It’s not even on a track for any of their colonies.”
“Hmm. And they came out of nowhere. That suggest anything to you?”
“Either they’re crazy, or maybe the UN inspector is along for a purpose,” mused Bismarck. “If they’re trying to make a timelike runaround on some enemy who’s—” His eyes widened.
“What is it?” demanded Ariadne.
“The Festival!” he exclaimed. His eyes danced. “Remember that? Five years ago? They’re going to attack the Festival!”
“They’re going to attack?” Ariadne Eldrich spluttered. “A Festival? Whatever for?”
A brief glazed look crossed Chu’s face, upload communion with a distributed meme repository far bigger and more powerful than every computer network of pre-Singularity Earth. “He’s right,” she said. “The rejectionists are going to attack the Festival as if it’s a limbic-imperialist invader.”
Ariadne Eldrich, Shipboard Facilities Coordinator and manager of more firepower than the New Republican Navy could even dream of, surrendered to the urge to cackle like a maniac. “They must be mad!”
TELEGRAM FROM THE DEAD
Before the singularity human beings living on Earth had looked at the stars and consoled themselves in their isolation with the comforting belief that the universe didn’t care.
Unfortunately, they were mistaken.
Out of the blue, one summer day in the middle of the twenty-first century, something unprecedented inserted itself into the swarming anthill of terrestrial civilization and stirred it with a stick. What it was—a manifestation of a strongly superhuman intelligence, as far beyond an augmented human’s brain as a human mind is beyond that of a frog—wasn’t in question. Where it was from, to say nothing of when it was from, was another matter.
Before the Singularity, developments in quantum logic had been touted as opening the door to esoteric breakthroughs in computational artificial intelligence. They’d also been working on funneling information back in time: perhaps as a route to the bulk movement of matter at faster-than-light speeds, although that was seen as less important than its application to computing. General relativity had made explicit, back in the twentieth century, the fact that both faster-than-light and time travel required a violation of causality—the law that every effect must have a prior cause. Various defense mechanisms and laws of cosmic censorship were proposed and discarded to explain why causality violation didn’t lead to widespread instability in the universe—and all of them were proven wrong during the Singularity.
About nine billion human beings simply vanished in the blink of an eye, sucked right out of the observable universe with nothing to show where they had gone. Strange impenetrable objects—tetrahedrons, mostly, but with some other platonic solids thrown in, silvery and massless—appeared dotted across the surface of the planets of the inner solar system. Networks crashed. One message crystallized out in the information-saturated pool of human discourse:
I am the Eschaton. I am not your god.
I am descended from you, and I exist in your future.
Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.
It took the stunned survivors twenty years to claw back from the edge of disaster, with nine-tenths of the work force gone and intricate economic ecosystems collapsing like defoliated jungles. It took them another fifty years to reindustrialize the inner solar system. Ten more years and the first attempts were made to apply the now-old tunneling breakthrough to interstellar travel.
In the middle of the twenty-second century, an exploration ship reached Barnard’s Star. Faint radio signals coming from the small second planet were decoded; the crew of the research mission learned what had happened to the people the Eschaton had removed. Scattered outside the terrestrial light cone, they’d been made involuntary colonists of thousands of worlds: exported through wormholes that led back in time as well as out in space, given a minimal support system of robot factories and an environment with breathable air. Some of the inhabited worlds, close to Earth, had short histories, but farther out, many centuries had passed.
The shock of this discovery would echo around the expanded horizons of human civilization for a thousand years, but all the inhabited worlds had one thing in common: somewhere there was a monument, bearing the injunction against causality violation. It seemed that forces beyond human comprehension took an interest in human affairs, and wanted everyone to know it. But when a course of action is explicitly forbidden, somebody will inevitably try it. And the Eschaton showed little sign of making allowances for the darker side of human nature…
The battlecruiser lay at rest, bathed in the purple glare of a stellar remnant. Every hour, on the hour, its laser grid lit up, sending a pulse of ultraviolet light into the void; a constellation of small interferometry platforms drifted nearby, connected by high-bandwidth laser links. Outside, space was hot: although no star gleamed in the center of the pupillary core, something in there was spitting out a rain of charged particles.
Elements of the battle fleet lay around the Lord Vanek, none of them close enough to see with the naked eye. They had waited here for three weeks as the stragglers popped out of jump transition and wearily cruised over to join the formation. Over the six weeks before that, the ship had made jump after jump—bouncing between the two components of an aged binary system that had long since ejected its planets into deep space and settled down to a lonely old age. Each jump reached farther into the future, until finally the ships were making millennial hops into the unknown.
The atmosphere in the wardroom was unusually tense. Aboard a warship under way, boredom is a constant presence: after nearly seven weeks, even the most imperturbable officers were growing irritable. Word that the last of the destroyers had arrived at the rendezvous had spread like wildfire through the ship a few hours earlier. A small cluster of officers huddled together in a corner, cradling a chilled bottle of schnapps and talking into the small hours of the shipboard night, trying desperately to relax, for tomorrow the fleet would begin the return journey, winding back around their own time line until they overhauled their own entry point into this system and became an intrusion into the loose-woven fabric of history itself.
“I only joined the Navy to see the fleshpots of Malacia,” Grubor observed. “Spend too long nursing the ship’s sewage-processing farm and before long the bridge crew starts treating you like a loose floater in free fall. They go off to receptions and suchlike whenever we enter port, but all I get is a chance to flush the silage tanks and study for the engineering board exams.”
“Flesh
pots!” Boursy snorted. “Pavel, you take your prospects too seriously. There’re no fleshpots on Malacia that you or I would be allowed anywhere near. Most places I can’t so much as breathe without Sauer taking notes on how well I’ve polished my tonsils; and then the place stinks, or it’s full of evil bugs, or the natives are politically unsound. Or weird. Or deformed, and into hideous and unnatural sexual perversions. You name it.”
“Still.” Grubor studied his drink. “It would have been nice to get to see at least one hideous and unnatural sexual perversion.”
Kravchuk twisted the lid off the bottle and pointed it in the direction of their glasses. Grubor shook his head; Boursy extended his for a top-up. “What I want to know is how we’re going to get back,” Kravchuk muttered. “I don’t understand how we can do that. Time only goes one way, doesn’t it? Stands to reason.”
“Reason, schmeason.” Grubor took a mouthful of spirit. “It doesn’t have to work that way. Not just ‘cause you want it to.” He glanced around. “No ears, eh? Listen, I think we’re in it up to our necks. There’s this secret drive fix they bought from Lord God-knows-where, that lets us do weird things with the time axis in our jumps. We only headed out to this blasted hole in space to minimize the chances of anyone finding us—or of the jumps going wrong. They’re looking for some kind of time capsule from home to tell us what to do next, what happened in the history books. Then we go back—farther than we came to get here, by a different route—and get where we’re going before we set off. With me so far? But the real problem is God. They’re planning on breaking the Third Commandment.”
Boursy crossed himself and looked puzzled. “What, disrespecting the holy father and mother? My family—”
“No, the one that says thou shalt not fuck with history or else, signed Yours Truly, God. That Third Commandment, the one burned into Thanksgiving Rock in letters six feet deep and thirty feet high. Got it?”
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