Singularity Sky e-1

by Charles Stross

  “Because most of our people aren’t ready for that,” Burya said bluntly. A tension in his back began to relax; if this monstrous Critic wanted to debate revolutionary dialectic, well of course he could oblige! “When we achieve the post-technological Utopia, it will be as you say. But for now, we need a vanguard party to lead the people to a full understanding of the principles of ideological correctness and posteconomic optimization.”

  “But Marxism-Gilderism and Democratic Extropianism is anarchist aesthetic. Why vanguard party? Why committee? Why revolution?”

  “Because it’s traditional, dammit!” Rubenstein exploded. “We’ve been waiting for this particular revolution for more than two hundred years. Before that, two hundred years back to the first revolution, this is how we’ve gone about it. And it works! So why shouldn’t we do it this way?”

  “Talk you of tradition in middle of singularity.” Sister Seventh twisted her head around to look out the windows at the foggy evening drizzle beyond. “Perplexity maximizes. Not understand singularity is discontinuity with all tradition? Revolution is necessary; deconstruct the old, ring in the new. Before, I questioned your sapience. Now, your sanity questionable: sapience not. Only sapient organism could exhibit superlative irrationality!”

  “That may be true.” Rubenstein gently squeezed the buzzer under his desk edge for the third time. Why isn’t it working? He wondered. “But what do you want here, with me?”

  Sister Seventh bared her teeth in a grin. “I come to deliver Criticism.” Ruby teardrop eyes focused on him as she surged to her feet, rippling slabs of muscle moving under her muddy brown skin. A fringe of reddish hair rippled erect on the Critic’s head. “Your guards not answer. I Criticize. You come: now!”

  The operations room on board the Lord Vanek was quiet, relaxed by comparison with the near panic at Wolf Depository; still, nobody could have mistaken it for a home cruise. Not with Ilya Murametz standing at the rear, watching everything intently. Not with the old man dropping by at least twice a day, just nodding from inside the doorway, but letting them know he was there. Not with the Admiral’s occasional presence, glowering silently from his wheelchair like a reminder of the last war.

  “Final maneuver option in one hour,” announced the helm supervisor.

  “Continue as ordered.”

  “Continue as ordered, aye. Recce? Your ball.”

  “Ready and waiting.” Lieutenant Marek turned around in his chair and looked at Ilya inquiringly. “Do you want to inspect the drone, sir?”

  “No. If it doesn’t run, I’ll know whom to blame.” Ilya smiled, trying to pull some of the sting from his words; with his lips pulled back from his teeth, it merely made him look like a cornered wolf. “Launch profile?”

  “Holding at minus ten minutes, sir.”

  “Right, then. Run the self-test sequence again. It can’t hurt.” Everyone was on edge from not knowing for sure whether the metallic reflector they’d picked up was the time capsule from home. Maybe the drone would tell them, and maybe not. But the longer they waited, the more edgy everyone got, and the edgier they were, the more likely they were to make mistakes.

  “Looks pretty good to me. Engine idle at about one percent, fuel tanks loaded, ullage rail and umbilical disconnects latched and ready, instrument package singing loud on all channels. I’m ready to begin launch bay closeout whenever you say, sir.”

  “Well then.” Ilya breathed deeply. “Get on the blower to whoever’s keeping an eye on it. Get things moving.”

  Down near the back end of the ship, far below the drive compartment and stores, lay a series of airlocks. Some of them were small, designed for crew egress; others were larger, and held entire service vehicles like the station transfer shuttle. One bay, the largest of all, held a pair of reconnaissance drones: three-hundred-tonne robots capable of surveying a star system or mapping a gas giant’s moons. The drones couldn’t carry a gravity drive (nothing much smaller than a destroyer could manage that), but they could boost at a respectable twentieth of a gee on the back of their nuclear-electric ion rocket, and they could keep it up for a very long time indeed. For faster flybys, they could be equipped with salt-water-fueled fission rockets like those of the Lord Vanek’s long-range torpedoes—but those were dirty, relatively inefficient, and not at all suited to the stealthy mapping of a planetary system.

  Each of the drones carried an instrument package studded with more sensors than every probe launched from Earth during the twentieth century. They were a throwback to the Lord Vanek’s nominal design mission, the semi-ironic goal inscribed on the end-user certificate: to boldly go where no man had gone before, to map new star systems on long-duration missions, and claim them in the name of the Emperor. Dropped off in an uninhabited system, a probe could map it in a couple of years and be ready to report in full when the bat-tlecruiser returned from its own destination. They were a force multiplier for the colonial cartographers, enabling one survey ship to map three systems simultaneously.

  Deep in the guts of the Lord Vanek, probe one was now waking up from its two-year sleep. A team of ratings hurried under the vigilant gaze of two chief petty officers, uncoupling the heavy fueling pipes and locking down inspection hatches. Sitting in a lead-lined coffin, probe one gurgled and pinged on a belly full of reaction mass and liquid water refrigerant. The compact fusion reactor buzzed gently, its beat-wave accelerators ramming a mixture of electrons and pions into a stream of lithium ions at just under the speed of light; neutrons spalled off, soaked into the jacket of water pipes, warming them and feeding pressure waves into the closed-circuit cooling system. The secondary solar generators, dismounted for this mission because of their irrelevance, lay in sheets at one end of the probe bay.

  “Five minutes to go. Launch bay reports main reactor compartment closeout. Wet crew have cleared the fueling hoses, report tank pressure is stable. I’m still waiting on telemetry closeout.”

  “Carry on.” Ilya watched patiently as Marek’s team monitored progress on the launch. He looked around briefly as the ops room door slid open; but it wasn’t the Captain or the Commodore, just the spy—no, the diplomatic agent from Earth. Whose presence was a waste of air and space, the Commander opined, although he could see reasons why the Admiral and his staff might not want to impede her nosy scrutiny.

  “What are you launching?” she asked shortly.

  “Survey drone.”

  “What are you surveying?”

  He turned and stared at her. “I don’t remember being told you had authority to oversee anything except our military activities,” he commented.

  The inspector shrugged, as if attempting to ignore the in-suit. “Perhaps if you told me what you were looking for, I could help you find it,” she said.

  “Unlikely.” He turned away. “Status, lieutenant?”

  “Two minutes to go. Telemetry bay closeout. Ah, we have confirmation of onboard control. It’s alive in there. Waiting on ullage baffle check, launch rail windup, bay depressurization coming up in sixty seconds.”

  “There’s the message capsule,” the inspector said quietly. “Hoping for a letter from home, Commander?”

  “You are annoying me,” Ilya said, almost casually. “That’s a bad idea. I say, over there! Yes, you! Status please!”

  “Bay pressure cell dump in progress. External launch door opening… launch rail power on the bus, probe going to internal power, switch over now. She’s on her own, sir. Launch in one minute. Final pre-flight self-test in progress.”

  “It’s my job to ask uncomfortable questions, Commander. And the important question to ask now is—”

  “Quiet, please!”

  “—Was the artifact you’re about to prod placed there by order of your Admiralty, or by the Festival?”

  “Launch in three-zero seconds,” Lieutenant Marek announced into the silence. He looked up. “Was it something I said?”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Ilya.

  Rachel shook her head. Arms crossed:
“If you don’t want to listen, be my guest.”

  “One-zero seconds to launch. Ullage pressure jets open. Reactor criticality coming up. Muon flux ramp nominal, accelerator gates clear. Um, reactor flux doubling has passed bootstrap level. Five seconds. Launch rail is go! Main heat pump is down to operating temperature!” The deck began to shudder, vibrating deep beneath the soles of their feet. “Two seconds. Reactor on temperature. Umbilical separation. Zero. We have full separation now. Probe one is clear of the launch bay. Doors closing. Gyrodyne turn in progress, ullage pressure maximal, three seconds to main engine ignition.” The shudder died away. “Deflection angle clear. Main engine ignition.” In the ops room, nothing stirred; but bare meters away from the ship, the probe’s stingerlike tail spat a red-orange beam of heavy metal ions. It began to drop away from the battlecruiser: as it did so, two huge wings, the thermal radiators, began to extend from its sides.

  Ilya came to a decision. “Lieutenant Marek, you have control,” he said. “Colonel. Come with me.”

  He opened the door; she followed him into the passage outside. “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “We’re going to have a little talk,” he said. Hurrying along toward the conference suite, he didn’t wait for her to keep up. Up the elevator, along the next passage, and into a room with a table and chairs in it; thankfully unoccupied. He waited for her to enter, then shut the door. “Sit down,” he said.

  The inspector sat on the edge of a chair, leaning forward, looking up at him with an earnest expression.

  “You think I’m going to tear a strip off you,” he began. “And you’re right, but for the wrong reason.”

  She raised a hand. “Let me guess. Raising policy issues in an executive context?” She looked at him, almost mockingly. “Listen, Commander. Until I came on the deck and saw what you were doing, I didn’t know what was happening either, but now I do I think you really want to hear what I’ve got to tell you, then tell it to the Captain. Or the Commodore. Or both. Chains of command are all very well, but if you’re going to retrieve that orbiting anomaly, then I think we may have less than six hours before all hell breaks loose, and I’d like to get the message across. So if we can postpone the theatrics until we’ve got time to spare, and just get on with things… ?”

  “You’re trying to be disruptive,” Ilya accused.

  “Yes.” She nodded. “I make a career of it. I poke into corners and ask uncomfortable questions and stick my nose into other people’s business and find answers that nobody realized were there. So far, I’ve saved eight cities and seventy million lives. Would you like me to be less annoying?”

  “Tell me what you know. Then I’ll decide.” He said the words carefully, as if making a great concession to her undisciplined refusal to stick to her place.

  Rachel leaned back. “It’s a matter of deduction,” she said. “It helps to have a bit of context. For starters, this ship—this fleet—didn’t just accidentally embark on a spacelike trip four thousand years into the future. You are attempting a maneuver that nearly, but not quite, violates a number of treaties and a couple of laws of nature that are enforced by semidivine fiat. You’re not going to go into your own past light cone, but you’re going to come very close indeed—dive deep into the future to circumvent any watchers or eaters or mines the Festival might lay in your path, jump over to the target, then reel yourselves back into the past and accidentally come out not-quite-before the Festival arrives. You know what that suggests to me? It suggests extreme foolhardiness. Rule Three is there for a reason. You’re banging on the Eschaton’s door if you test it.”

  “I had that much already,” Ilya acknowledged. “So?”

  “Well, you should ask, what should we have expected to find here? We get here, and we’re looking for a buoy. A time capsule with detailed tactical notes from our own past light cone—an oracle, in effect, telling us a lot about the enemy that we can’t possibly know yet because our own time line hasn’t intersected with them. Yet more cheating. But we’re alive.”

  “I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t we be?”

  “Because—” She stared at him for a moment. “Do you know what happens to people who use causality violation as a weapon?” she asked. “You’re incredibly close to doing it, which is crazy enough. And you got away with it! Which simply isn’t in the script, unless the rules have changed.”

  “Rules? What are you talking about?”

  “Rules.” She rolled her eyes. “The rules of physics are, in some cases, suspiciously anthropic. Starting with the Heisenberg Principle, that the presence of an observer influences the subject of observation at a quantum level, and working from there, we can see a lot of startling correlations in the universe. Consider the ratio of the strong nuclear force to the electromagnetic force, for example. Twiddle it one way a little, and neutrons and protons wouldn’t react; fusion couldn’t take place. Twiddle it in a different direction, and the stellar fusion cycle would stop at helium—no heavier nuclei could ever be formed. There are so many correlations like this that cosmologists theorize we live in a universe that exists specifically to give rise to our kind of life, or something descended from it. Like the Eschaton.”

  “So?”

  “So you people are breaking some of the more arcane cosmological laws. The ones that state that any universe in which true causality violation—time travel—occurs is de facto unstable. But causality violation is only possible when there’s a causal agent—in this case an observer—and the descendants of that observer will seriously object to causality violation. Put it another way: it’s accepted as a law of cosmology because the Eschaton won’t put up with idiots who violate it. That’s why my organization tries to educate people out of doing it. I don’t know if anyone told your Admiralty what happened out in the back of beyond, in what is now the Crab Nebula: but there’s a pulsar there that isn’t natural, let’s put it that way, and an extinct species of would-be galactic conquerors. Someone tried to bend the rules—and the Eschaton nailed them.”

  Ilya forced himself to uncurl his fingers from the arms of his chair. “You’re saying that the capsule we’re about to retrieve is a bomb? Surely the Eschaton would have tried to kill us by now, or at least capture us—”

  She grinned, humorlessly. “If you don’t believe me, that’s your problem. We’ve seen half a dozen incidents like this before—the UN Defense Intelligence Causal Weapons Analysis Committee, I mean—incidents where one or another secret attempt to assemble a causality-violation device came to grief. Not usually anything as crude as your closed timelike flight path and oracle hack, by the way; these were real CVDs. History editors, minimax censors, grandfather bombs, and a really nasty toy called a spacelike ablator. There’s a whole ontology of causality-violation weapons out there, just like nukes— atom bombs, fission-boosted fusion bombs, electroweak imploders, and so on.

  “Each and every one of the sites where we saw CVDs deployed had been trashed, thoroughly and systematically, by unidentified agencies—but agencies attributable to the Eschaton. We’ve never actually seen one in the process of being destroyed, because the big E tends toward overkill in such cases—the smallest demolition tool tends to be something like a five-hundred-kilometer asteroid dropped on the regional capital at two hundred kilometers per second.

  “So I guess the big surprise is that we’re still alive.” She glanced around at the vacant chairs, the powered-down work-station on the table. “Oh, and one other thing. The Eschaton always wipes out CVDs just before they go live. We figure it knows where to find them because it runs its own CVD. Sort of like preserving a regional nuclear hegemony by attacking anyone who builds a uranium enrichment plant or a nuclear reactor, yes? Anyway. You haven’t quite begun to break the law yet. The fleet is assembling, you’ve located the time capsule, but you haven’t actually closed the loop or made use of the oracle in a forbidden context. You might even get away with it if you hop backward but don’t try to go any earlier than your own departure point. But
I’d be careful about opening that time capsule. At least, do it a sensible distance away from any of your ships. You never know what it might contain.”

  Ilya nodded reluctantly. “I think the Captain should be aware of this.”

  “You could say that.” She looked at the console. “There’s another matter. I think you need all the advantages you can get your hands on right now, and one of them is spending most of his time sitting in his cabin twiddling his thumbs. You might want to have a word with Martin Springfield, the dockyard engineer. He’s an odd man, and you’ll need to make more allowances in his direction than you’d normally be inclined to, but I think he knows more than he’s letting on—much more, when it comes to propulsion systems. MiG wasn’t paying him two thousand crowns a week just because he has a pretty face. When MiG sold your Admiralty this bird, it was also betting on a fifty-year maintenance and upgrade contract—probably worth more revenue than the initial sale, in fact.”

  “What are you trying to say?” Ilya looked irritated. “Engineering issues aren’t up to me, you should know that already. And I’ll thank you for not telling me my—”

  “Shut up.” She reached over and grabbed his arm—not hard, but firmly enough to shock him. “You really don’t understand how an arms cartel works, do you? Look. MiG sold your government a ship to perform to certain specifications. Specifications that could fulfill the requirements your Admiralty dreamed up. The specs they designed it to are a different matter—but they certainly intended to charge for upgrades throughout its life. And they’ve probably got more experience of real-world interstellar combat requirements than your Ad-miralty, which—unless I’m very much mistaken—has never before fought a real interstellar war as opposed to sending a few gunboats to intimidate stone-age savages. Be nice to Springfield, and he may surprise you. After all, his life depends on this ship doing its job successfully.” She let go.