Singularity Sky (36 page)

“You alright?” he croaked.

“Just a minute.” Rachel closed her eyes again and let her arms float upward until they almost touched the glassy overhead screen—which was much, much closer than Martin had originally thought. The capsule was a truncated cylinder, perhaps four meters in diameter at the base and three at the top, but it was less than two meters high; about the same volume as the passenger compartment of a hackney carriage. (The fuel tanks and motor beneath it were significantly larger.) It hummed and gurgled quietly with the rhythm of the life-support pipework, spinning very slowly around its long axis. “We’re making twelve meters per second. That’s good. Puts us a kilometer or so from the ship … damn, what’s going on back there?”

“Somebody on EVA? Looking for us.”

“Seems like more than one of ’em. Almost like a debris cloud.” Her eyes widened in horror as Martin watched her.

“Whatever happened, it happened after we left. If you’d triggered a blowout, we’d be surrounded by debris, wouldn’t we?”

She shook her head. “We should go back and help. We’ve got a—”

“Bullshit. They’ve got EVA teams suited up all the time they’re at battle stations, you know that as well as I do. It’s not your problem. Let me guess.

Someone tried to get into your cabin after we left. Tried a bit too hard, by the look of it.”

She stared at the distant specks floating around the rear of the warship, a stubby cylinder in the middle distance. “But if I hadn’t—”

“I’d be on my way to the airlock with my hands taped behind my back, and you’d be under arrest,” he pointed out.

Tired, cold, rational. His head ached; this capsule must be at a lower pressure than the ship. His hands were shaking and cold in reaction to the events of the past five minutes. Ten minutes. However long it had been.

“You saved my life, Rachel. If you’d stop kicking yourself over it for a minute, I’d like to thank you.”

“If there’s anyone out there and we leave them—”

“The EVA crew will get them. Trust me on this, I figure they tried to blow their way into your cabin. Didn’t check that it wasn’t open to space first, and got blown a bit farther than they expected. That’s what warships have away teams and jolly boats for. What we should be worrying about now is hoping nobody notices us before the final event.”

“Um.” Rachel shook her head: her expression relaxed slightly, tension draining. A certain darkness seemed to lift. “We’re still going to be entirely too close for my liking. We’ve got another cold-gas tank, that’ll give us an extra ten meters per second; if I use it now that means we’ll have drifted about 250 kilometers from the ship before perigee, but before then, they should begin maneuvering and widen the gap considerably. We’ve got enough water and air for a week. I was figuring on a couple of full-on burns to take us downside while they’re busy paying attention to the enemy defenses, whatever they turn out to be. If there are any.”

“I’m betting on eaters, shapers.” Martin nodded briefly, then held his head still as the world seemed to spin around him. Not spacesickness, surely?

The thought of being cooped up in this cubbyhole for a week with a bad case of the squirts was too revolting to contemplate. “Maybe antibodies.

Nothing the New Republic understands, anyway. Probably easy enough for us to avoid, but if you go in shooting—”

“Yeah.” Rachel yawned.

“You look exhausted.” Concern filled him. “How the hell did you do that? I mean, back on the ship? It must take it out on you later—”

“It does.” She bent forward and fumbled with a blue fishnet, down around what would have been the floor of the cabin. Surprisingly homely containers of juice floated out, tumbling in free fall. She grabbed one and began to suck on the nozzle greedily. “Help yourself.”

“Not that I’m ungrateful or anything,” Martin added, batting a wandering mango and durian fruit cordial out of his face, “but—why?” She stared at him for a long moment. “Oh,” he said.

She let the empty carton float free and turned to face him. “I’d prefer to give you some kind of bullshit about trust and duty and so on. But.” She shrugged uncomfortably in her seat harness. “Doesn’t matter.” She held out a hand. Martin took it and squeezed, wordlessly.

“You didn’t blow your mission,” he pointed out. “You never had a mission out here. Not realistically, anyway, not what your boss, what was his name?”

“George. George Cho.”

“—George thought. Insufficient data, right? What would he have done if he’d known about the Festival?”

“Possibly nothing different.” She smiled bleakly at the empty juice carton, then plucked another from the air. “You’re dead wrong; I still have a job to do, if and when we arrive. The chances of which have just gone down by, oh, about fifty percent because of this escapade.”

“Huh. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help, alright?” Martin stretched, then flinched with a remembered pain. “You wouldn’t have seen my PA would you? After—”

“It’s bagged under your chair, along with a toothbrush and a change of underwear. I hit your cabin after they pulled you in.”

“You’re a star,” he exclaimed happily. He bent double and began fishing around in the cramped space under the control console. “Oh my—”

Straightening up, he opened the battered gray book. Words and pictures swam across the pages in front of him. He tapped an imaginary keyboard; new images gelled. “You need any help running this boat?”

“If you want.” She drained the second container, thrust both the empties into the bag. “Yes, if you want. You’ve flown before?”

“Spent twelve years at L5. Basic navigation, no problem. If it’s got a standard life-support module, I can program the galley, too. Traditional Yorkshire habit, that, learning how to cook black pudding in free fall. The trick is to spin the ship around the galley, so that the sausage stays still while the grill rotates—”

She chuckled; a carton of cranberry juice bounced off his head. “Enough already!”

“Alright.” He leaned back, the PA floating before him. Its open pages showed a real-time instrument feed from the lifeboat’s brain. (A clock in one corner spiraled down the seconds to Rachel’s first programmed deceleration burn, two thousand seconds before perigee.) Frowning, he scribbled glyphs with a stylus. “We should make it. Assuming they don’t shoot at us.”

“We’ve got a Red Cross transponder. They’d have to manually override their IFF.”

“Which they won’t do unless they’re really pissed off. Good.” Martin tapped a final period on the page. “I’d be happier if I knew what we were flying into, though. I mean, if the Festival hasn’t left anything in orbit—” They both froze.

Something scraped across the top of the escape capsule, producing a sound like hollow metal bones rattling against a cage.

The rabbit snarled and hefted his submachine gun angrily. Ears back and teeth visible, he hissed at the cyborg.

Sister Seventh sat up and stared at the confrontation. Everyone else except Burya Rubenstein ducked; Burya stepped forward into the middle of the clearing. “Stop this! At once!”

For a long moment the rabbit stood, frozen. Then he relaxed his stiff-backed pose and lowered his gun muzzle. “He started it.”

“I don’t care what he started: we have a job to do, and it does not require shooting each other.” He turned to the cyborg whom the rabbit had confronted. “What did you say?”

The revolutionary looked bashful; her fully extended claws retracted slowly.

“Is not good extropian. This creature—” her gesture at the rabbit brought another show of teeth—“believe cult of personality! Is counterrevolutionary dissident. Head-launch now! Headlaunch now!”

Burya squinted. Many of the former revolutionaries had gone overboard on the personal augmentations offered by the Festival, without realizing that it was necessary to modify their central nervous systems in order to run them.

This led to a certain degree of confusion. “But, comrade, you have a personality, too. A sense of identity is a necessary precondition to consciousness, and that, as the great leaders and teachers point out, is the keystone upon which the potential for transcendence is built.”

The cyborg looked puzzled. Mirror-finished nictitating membranes flashed across her eyeballs, reflecting inner thoughts. “But within society of mind there is no personality. Personality arises from society; therefore, individual can have no—”

“I think you misunderstand the great philosophers,” Rubenstein said slowly.

“This is not a criticism, comrade, for the philosophers are, of their essence, very brilliant and hard to follow; but by ‘society of mind’, they were referring to the arrival of consciousness within the individual, arising from lesser pre-conscious agents, not to society outside the person. Thus, it follows that being attached to one’s own consciousness is not to follow a cult of personality. Now, following another’s—” He broke off and looked sharply at the rabbit. “I don’t think we will pursue this question any further,” he said primly. “Time to move on.”

The cyborg nodded jerkily. Her fellows stood (or in one case, uncoiled) and shouldered their packs; Burya walked over to Sister Seventh’s hut and climbed inside. Presently the party moved off.

“Not understand revolutionary sense,” commented the Critic, munching on a sweet potato as the hut bounced along the dirt track behind the detachment from the Plotsk soviet. “Sense of identity deprecated?

Lagomorph Criticized for affinity to self? Nonsense! How appreciate art without sense of self?”

Burya shrugged. “They’re too literal-minded,” he said quietly. “All doing, no innovative thinking. They don’t understand metaphors well; half of them think you’re Baba Yaga returned, you know? We’ve been a, ah, stable culture too long. Patterns of belief, attitudes, get ingrained. When change comes, they are incapable of responding. Try to fit everything into their preconceived dogmas.” He leaned against the swaying wall of the hut. “I got so tired of trying to wake them up …”

Sister Seventh snorted. “What you call that?” she asked, pointing through the door of the hut. Ahead of them marched a column of wildly varied cyborgs, partially augmented revolutionaries frozen halfway beyond the limitations of their former lives. At its head marched the rabbit, leading them into the forest of the partially transcended wilderness.

Burya peered at the rabbit. “I’d call it anything it wants. It’s got a gun, hasn’t it?”

By noon, the forest had changed beyond recognition. Some strange biological experiment had warped the vegetation. Trees and grass had exchanged leaves, so that now they walked on a field of spiny pine needles, while flat blades waved overhead; the leaves were piebald, black and green, with the glossy black spreading. Most disturbingly of all, the shrubbery seemed to be blurring at the edges, species exchanging phenotypic traits with unnatural promiscuous abandon. “What’s responsible for this?” Burya asked Sister Seventh, during one of their hourly pauses.

The Critic shrugged. “Is nothing. Lysenkoist forestry fringe, recombinant artwork. Beware the Jabberwocky, my son. Are there only Earth native derivations in this biome?”

“You asking me?” Rubenstein snorted. “I’m no gardener.”

“Guesstimation implausible,” Sister Seventh replied archly. “In any event, some fringeworks are recombinant. Non human-centric manipulations of genome. Elegant structures, modified for non-purpose. This forest is Lamarckian. Nodes exchange phenotype-determinant traits, acquire useful ones.”

“Who determines their usefulness?”

“The Flower Show. Part of the Fringe.”

“What a surprise,” Burya muttered.

At the next stop, he approached the rabbit. “How far?” he demanded.

The lagomorph sniffed at the breeze. “Fifty kilometers? Maybe more?” It looked faintly puzzled, as if the concept of distance was a difficult abstraction.

“You said sixty kilometers this morning,” Burya pointed out, “We’ve come twenty. Are you sure? The militia doesn’t trust you, and if you keep changing your mind, I may not be able to stop them doing something stupid.”

“I’m just a rabbit.” Ears twitched backward, swiveling to either side to listen for threats. “Know where master is, was, attacked by Mimes. Haven’t heard much from him since, you bet. Always know where he is, don’t know how—but can’t tell you how far. Like fucking compass in my head, mate, you understand?“

“How long have you been a rabbit?” asked Rubenstein, an awful suspicion coming to mind.

The rabbit looked puzzled. “I don’t rightly know. I think I once—” He stopped talking. Iron shutters came down, blocking the light behind his eyes. “No more words. Find master. Rescue!”

“Who is your master?” Burya demanded.

“Felix,” said the rabbit.

“Felix … Politovsky?”

“Don’t know. Maybe.” Rabbit twitched his ears right back and bared his teeth. “Don’t want to talk! We there tomorrow. Rescue master. Kill the Mimes.”

Vassily looked down at the stars wheeling beneath his feet. I’m going to die, he thought, swallowing acrid bile.

When he closed his eyes, the nausea went away a little. His head still hurt where he’d thumped it against the wall of the cabin on his way through; everything had blurred for a while, and he’d caught himself floating away on a cloud of pain. Now he had time to reflect, the pain seemed like an ironic joke; corpses didn’t hurt, did they? It told him he was still alive. When it stopped hurting—

He relived the disaster again and again. Sauer checking everybody was suited up. “It’s just a pinhole,” someone said, and it had seemed so plausible—the woman had let some air out of her cabin to trip the decompression interlocks—and then the bright flash of the cutting cord proved him wrong. The howling maelstrom had reached out and yanked the lieutenant and the CPO right out of the ship, into a dark tunnel full of stars. Vassily had tried to catch a door handle, but the clumsy mitten hands of his emergency suit wouldn’t grip. They’d left him tumbling over and over like a spider caught in the whirlpool when a bath plug is pulled.

Stars whirled, cold lights like daggers in the night outside his eyelids. This is it. I’m really going to die. Not going home again. Not going to arrest the spy. Not going to meet my father and tell him what I really think of him.