Singularity Sky e-1

by Charles Stross

  Boursy looked dubious. “It could have been some joker in orbit with a primary-phase free-electron laser—”

  “Weren’t no such things in those days. I despair of you sometimes, I really do. Look, the fact is, we don’t know what in hell’s sixteen furnaces is waiting for us at Rochard’s World. So we’re sneaking up on it from behind, like the peasant in the story who goes hunting elephants with a mirror because he’s never seen one and he’s so afraid that—” Out of the corner of his eye, Grubor noted Sauer—unofficially the ship’s political officer—walk in the door.

  “Who are you calling a cowardly peasant?” rumbled Boursy, also glancing at the door. “I’ve known the Captain for eighty-seven years, and he’s a good man! And the Admiral, are you calling the Admiral a fairy?”

  “No, I’m just trying to point out that we’re all afraid of one thing or another and—” Grubor gesticulated in the wrong direction.

  “Are you calling me a poof?” Bftarsy roared.

  “No, I’m not!” Grubor shouted back at him. Spontaneous applause broke out around the room, and one of the junior cadets struck up a stirring march on the pianola. Unfortunately his piano-playing was noteworthy more for his enthusiasm than his melodious harmony, and the wardroom rapidly degenerated into a heckling match between the cadet’s supporters (who were few) and everyone else.

  “Nothing can go wrong,” Boursy said smugly. “We’re going to sail into Rochard’s system and show the flag and send those degenerate alien invaders packing. You’ll see. Nothing will, er, did, go wrong.”

  “I dunno about that.” Kravchuk, normally tight-lipped to the point of autism, allowed himself to relax slightly when drinking in private with his brother officers. “The foreign bint, the spy or diplomat or whatever. She’s meant to be keeping an eye on us, right? Don’t see why the Captain’s going so easy on ‘em, I’d march ’er out the dorsal loading hatch as soon as let ‘er keep breathing our good air.”

  “She’s in this too,” said Boursy. “Bet you she wants us to win, too—look pretty damn stupid if we didn’t, what? Anyway, the woman’s got some kind of diplomatic status; she’s allowed to poke her nose into things if she wants.”

  “Huh. Well, the bint had better keep her nose out of my missile loaders, less she wants to learn what the launch tubes look like from inside.”

  Grubor stretched his legs out. “Just like Helsingus’s dog, huh.”

  “Helsingus has a pet dog?” Boursy was suddenly all ears.

  “He had a dog. Past tense. A toy schnauzer this long.” Grubor held his hands improbably close together. “Little rat-brained weasel of an animal. Bad-tempered as hell, yapped like a bosun with a hangover, and it took to dumping in the corridor to show it owned the place. And nobody said anything—nobody could say anything.”

  “What happened?” asked Boursy.

  “Oh, one day it picked the wrong door to crap outside. The old man came out in a hurry and stepped in it before the rating I’d sent to follow the damn thing around got there to mop up. I heard about this, but I never saw the animal again; I think it got to walk home. And Helsingus sulked for weeks, I can tell you.”

  “Dog curry in the wardroom,” said Kravchuk. “I had to pick hairs out of my teeth for days.”

  Boursy did a double take, then laughed hesitantly. Slugging back his schnapps to conceal his confusion, he asked: “Why did the Captain put up with it that long?”

  “Who knows, indeed? For that matter, who the hell knows why the Admiral puts up with the foreign spy?” Grubor stared into his glass and sighed. “Maybe the Admiral actually wants her along. And then again, maybe he’s just forgotten about her…”

  “Beg to report, I’ve got something, sir,” said the sensor op. He pointed excitedly at his plot on the bridge of the light cruiser Integrity.

  Lieutenant Kokesova looked up, bleary-eyed. “What is it now, Menger?” he demanded. Six hours on this interminable dog-watch was getting to him. He rubbed his eyes, red-rimmed, and tried to focus them on his subordinate.

  “Plot trace, sir. Looks like… hmm, yes. It’s a definite return, from the first illumination run on our survey sector. Six-point-two-three light-hours. Er, yes. Tiny little thing. Processing now… looks like a metal object of some kind, sir. Orbiting about two-point-seven billion kilometers out from the, uh, primary, pretty much at opposition to us right now, hence the delay.”

  “Can you fix its size and orbital components?” asked the Lieutenant, leaning forward.

  “Not yet, but soon, sir. We’ve been pinging on the hour; that should give me enough to refine a full set of elements pretty soon—say when the next response set comes in. But it’s a long way away, ‘bout four-zero astronomical units. Um, preliminary enhancement says it’s about five-zero meters in diameter, plus or minus an order of magnitude. Might be a lot smaller than that if it’s got reflectors.”

  “Hmm.” Kokesova sat down. “Nav. You got anything else in this system that fits the bill?”

  “No, sir.”

  Kokesova glanced up at the forward screen; the huge red-rimmed eye of the primary glared back at him, and he shuddered, flicked a hand gesture to avert the evil eye. “Then I think we may have our time capsule. Menger, do you have any halo objects? Anything else at all?”

  “No, sir.” Menger shook his head. “Inner system’s clean as a slate. It’s unnatural, you ask me. Nothing there except this object.”

  Kokesova stood again and walked over to the sensor post. “One of these days you’re going to have to learn how to complete a sentence, Menger,” he said tiredly.

  “Yes, sir. Humbly apologize for bad grammar, sir.”

  All was silent in the ops room for ten minutes, save for the scribble of Menger’s stylus on his input station, and the clack of dials turning beneath skillful fingertips. Then a low whistle.

  “What is it?”

  “Got confirmation, sir. Humbly report you might want to see this.”

  “Put it on the main screen, then.”

  “Aye aye.” Menger pushed buttons, twisted knobs, scribbled some more. The forward screen, previously fixed on the hideous red eye, dissolved into a sea of pink mush. A single yellow dot swam in the middle of it; near one corner, a triangle marked the ship’s position. “This is an unenhanced lidar map of what’s in front of us. Sorry it’s so vague, but the scale is huge—you could drop the whole of home system into one quadrant, and it’s taken us a week to build this data set. Anyway, here’s what happens when I run my orbital-period filter in the plane of the ecliptic.”

  He pushed a button. A green line rotated through the mush, like the hour hand of a clock, and vanished.

  “I thought you said you’d found something.” Kokesova sounded slightly peeved.

  “Er, yes, sir. Just a moment. Nothing there, as you see. But then I reran the filter for inclined circular orbits.” A green disc appeared near the edge of the haze, and tilted slowly. Something winked violet, close to the central point, then vanished again. “There it is. Really small, orbit inclined at almost nine-zero degrees to the plane of the ecliptic. Which is why it took us so long to spot it.”

  “Ah.” Kokesova stared at the screen for a moment, a warm glow of satisfaction spreading through him. “Well, well, well.” Kokesova stared at the violet dot for a long time before he picked up the intercom handset. “Corams: get me the Captain. Yes, I know he’s aboard the Lord Vanek. I have something I think the brass will want to hear about…”

  Procurator Vassily Muller paused outside the cabin door and took a deep breath. He rapped on the door once, twice: when there was no response he tried to turn the handle. It refused to budge. He breathed out, then let a fine loop of stiff wire drop down his right sleeve and ran it into the badge slot. It was just like the training school: a momentary flash of light and the handle rotated freely. He tensed instinctively, fall-out from the same conditioning (which had focused on search and seizure ops, mist and night abductions in a damp stone city where the only constants were fear an
d dissent).

  The cabin was tidy: not as tidy as a flyer’s, policed by sharp-tongued officers, but tidy enough. The occupant, a creature of habit, was at lunch and would not be back for at least fifteen minutes. Vassily took it all in with wide eyes. There were no obvious signs of fine wires or hairs anchored to the doorframe: he stepped inside and pulled the door to.

  Martin Springfield had few possessions on the Lord Vanek: symptomatic of his last-minute conscription. What he had was almost enough to make Vassily jealous: his own presence here was even less planned, and he’d a lot of time to bitterly regret having misunderstood the Citizen’s Socratic warning (“What have you forgotten?” to a man searching a ship about to depart!); nevertheless, he had a job to do, and enough residual professionalism to do it properly. It didn’t take Vassily long to exhaust the possibilities: the only thing to catch his attention was the battered grey case of the PA, sitting alone in the tiny desk drawer beneath the cabin’s workstation.

  He turned the device over carefully, looking for seams and openings. It resembled a hardback book: microcapsules embedded in each page changed color, depending what information was loaded into it at the time. But no book could answer to its master’s voice, or rebalance a ship’s drive kernel. The spine—he pushed, and after a moment of resistance it slid upward to reveal a compartment with some niches in it. One of them was occupied.

  Nonstandard extension pack, he realized. Without thinking, he pushed on it; it clicked out and he pocketed it. There’d be time enough to put it back later if it was innocent. Springfield’s presence on the ship was an aching rasp on his nerves: the man had to be up to something! The Navy had plenty of good engineers; why could they want a foreigner along? After the events of the past couple of weeks, Vassily could not accept that anything less than sabotage could be responsible. As every secret policeman knows, there is no such thing as a coincidence; the state has too many enemies.

  He didn’t linger in the engineer’s cabin but paused to palm an inconspicuous little bead under the lower bunk bed. The bead would hatch in a day or so, spinning a spiderweb of receptors; a rare and expensive tool that Vassily was privileged to own.

  The doorway clicked locked behind him; amnesiac, it would not report this visit to its owner.

  Back in his cabin, Vassily locked his door and sat down on his own bunk. He loosened his collar, then reached into a breast pocket for the small device he had taken. He rolled it over in his fingers, pondering. It could be anything, anything at all. Taking a small but powerful device from his inventory of tools—one forbidden to any citizen of the Republic except those with an Imperial warrant to save the state from itself— he checked it for activity. There was nothing obvious: it wasn’t emitting radiation, didn’t smell of explosives or bioactive compounds, and had a standard interface.

  “Riddle me this: an unknown expansion pod in an engineer’s luggage. I wonder what it is?” he said aloud. Then he plugged the pod into his own interface and started the diagnostics running. A minute later, he began to swear quietly under his breath. The module was totally randomized. Evidence of misdoing, that was sure enough. But what kind of misdoing?

  Burya Rubenstein sat in the Ducal palace, now requisitioned as the headquarters of the Extropians and Cyborgs’ Soviet, sipping tea and signing proclamations with a leaden heart.

  Outside the thick oak door of his office, a squad of ward-geese waited patiently, their dark eyes and vicious gunbeaks alert for intruders. The half-melted phone that had started the revolution sat, unused, on the desk before him, while the pile of papers by his left elbow grew higher, and the unsigned pile to his right shrank. It wasn’t a part of the job that he enjoyed— quite the opposite, in fact—but it seemed to be necessary. Here was a soldier convicted of raping and looting a farmstead who needed to be punished. There, a teacher who had denounced the historical processes of Democratic Transhumanism as misguided technophile pabulum, encouraging his juvenile charges to chant the Emperor’s birthday hymn. Dross, all dross—and the revolution had no time to sift the dross for gold, rehabilitating and re-educating the fallen: it had been a month since the arrival of Festival, and soon the Emperor’s great steel warships would loom overhead.

  If Bury a had anything to do with it, they wouldn’t find anyone willing to cooperate in the subjugation of the civil populace, who were now fully caught up in the processes of a full-scale economic singularity. A singularity—a historical cusp at which the rate of change goes exponential, rapidly tending toward infinity—is a terrible thing to taste. The arrival of the Festival in orbit around the pre-industrial colony world had brought an economic singularity; physical wares became just so many atoms, replicated to order by machines that needed no human intervention or maintenance. A hard take-off singularity ripped up social systems and economies and ways of thought like an artillery barrage. Only the forearmed—the Extropian dissident underground, hard men like Burya Rubenstein— were prepared to press their own agenda upon the suddenly molten fabric of a society held too close to the blowtorch of progress.

  But change and control brought a price that Rubenstein was finding increasingly unpalatable. Not that he could see any alternatives, but the people were accustomed to being shepherded by father church and the benign dictatorship of the little father, Duke Politovsky. The habits of a dozen lifetimes could not be broken overnight, and to make an omelet it was first necessary to crack some eggshells.

  Burya had a fatal flaw; he was not a violent man. He resented and hated the circumstances that forced him to sign arrest warrants and compulsory upload orders; the revolution he had spent so long imagining was a glorious thing, unsullied by brute violence, and the real world—with its recalcitrant monarchist teachers and pigheaded priests—was a grave disappointment to him. The more he was forced to corrupt his ideals, the more he ached inside, and the more it grieved him, the more he hated the people who forced him to such hideous, bloody extremity of action—until they, in turn, became grist for the machinery of revolution, and subsequently bar stock for the scalpel blades that prodded his conscience and kept him awake long into the night, planning the next wave of purges and forcible uploads.

  He was deep in his work, oblivious to the outside world, depressed and making himself more so by doing the job that he had always wanted to do but never realized would be this awful—when a voice spoke to him.

  “Burya Rubenstein.”

  “What!” He looked up, almost guiltily, like a small boy discovered goofing off in class by a particularly stern teacher.

  “Talk. We. Must.” The thing sitting in the chair opposite him was so nightmarish that he blinked several times before he could make his eyes focus on it. It was hairless and pink and larger-than-human-sized, with stubby legs and paws and little pink eyes—and four huge, yellowing tusks, like the incisors of a rat the size of an elephant. The eyes stared at him with disquieting intelligence as it manipulated an odd pouch molded from the belt that was its only garment. “You talk. To me.”

  Burya adjusted his pince-nez and squinted at the thing. “Who are you and how did you get in here?” he asked. I haven’t been sleeping enough, part of his mind gibbered quietly; I knew the caffeine tablets would do this eventually…

  “I am. Sister of Stratagems. The Seventh. I am of the clade of Critics. Talk to me now.”

  A look of extreme puzzlement crossed Rubenstein’s craggy face. “Didn’t I have you executed last week?”

  “I very much doubt. It.” Hot breath that stank of cabbage, corruption and soil steamed in Burya’s face.

  “Oh, good.” He leaned back, light-headed. “I’d hate to think I was going mad. How did you sneak past my guards?”

  The thing in the chair stared at him. It was an unnerving sensation, like being sized up for a hangman’s noose by a man-eating saber-toothed sausage. “You guards are. Nonsapient. No intentional stance. Early now, you learn lesson of not trusting unsapient guards to recognize threat. I made self non-threat within their—you have no word for it.�
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  “I see.” Burya rubbed his forehead distractedly.

  “You do not.” Sister Seventh grinned at Rubenstein, and he recoiled before the twenty-centimeter digging fangs, yellow-brown and hard enough to crack concrete. “Ask no questions, human. I ask, are you sapient? Evidence ambiguous. Only sapients create art, but your works not distinctive.”

  “I don’t think—” He stopped. “Why do you want to know?”

  “A question.” The thing carried on grinning at him. “You asked. A question.” It rocked from side to side, shivering slightly, and Rubenstein began feeling cautiously along the underside of his desk, for the panic button that would set alarm bells ringing in the guardroom. “Good question. I Critic am. Critics follow Festival for many lifetimes. We come to Criticize. First want I to know, am I Criticizing sapients? Or is just puppet show on cave wall of reality? Zombies or zimboes? Shadows of mind? Amusements for Eschaton?”

  A shiver ran up and down Burya’s spine. “I think I’m sapient,” he said cautiously. “Of course, I’d say that even if I wasn’t, wouldn’t I? Your question is unanswerable. So why ask it?”

  Sister Seventh leaned forward. “None of your people ask anything,” she hissed. “Food, yes. Guns, yes. Wisdom? No. Am beginning think you not aware of selves, ask nothing.”

  “What’s to ask for?” Burya shrugged. “We know who we are and what we’re doing. What should we want—alien philosophies?”

  “Aliens want your philosophy,” Sister Seventh pointed out. “You give. You not take. This is insult to Festival. Why ? Prime interrogative!”

  “I’m not sure I understand. Are you complaining because we’re not making demands?”

  Sister Seventh chomped at the air, clattering her tusks together. “Ack! Quote, the viability of a postsingularity economy of scarcity is indicated by the transition from an indirection-layer-based economy using markers of exchange of goods and services to a tree-structured economy characterized by optimal allocation of productivity systems in accordance with iterated tit-for-tat prisoner’s dilemma. Money is a symptom of poverty and inefficiency. Unquote, the Marxist-Gilderist manifesto. Chapter two. Why you not performing?”