Singularity Sky (41 page)

Out toward Sputnik, the Festival took note of some activity by Bouncers.

They seemed to be clearing up a small mess: a handful of slow, inefficient ships that had approached without warning and opened fire on the Bouncers with primitive energy weapons. The Bouncers responded with patient lethality; anything that menaced them died. Some small craft slipped by, evidently not involved in the assault; a number of the second wave broke and ran, and they, too, were spared. But for the most part, the Festival ignored them. Anyone so single-mindedly hostile as to attack the Festival was hardly likely to be a good source of information: as for the others, it would have a chance to talk to them when they arrived.

The air in the lifeboat was foul with a stench of sweat and stale farts.

Rachel sat hunched over her backup console, staring unblinkingly at the criticality monitors while the rocket howled and rumbled beneath them: while a single output jitter might kill them before she could even blink, it made her feel better to go through the motions. Besides, she was totally exhausted: as soon as they touched down she had every intention of sleeping for three days. It had been fourteen hours since they escaped from the Lord Vanek; fourteen hours on top of a day and a sleepless night before. If she stopped making the effort to stay awake—

“Riddle this interrogative.” The creature on the screen snapped its tusks, red light gleaming off fangs like blood. “Why not you Bouncers accept?”

“I couldn’t possibly place myself further in their debt,” she said as smoothly as she could manage. Neutron flux stable at ten kilobecquerels per minute, warned her implants. A hundred chest X rays, in other words, sustained for four hours during the deceleration cycle. The lifeboat’s motor shuddered beneath her like something alive. Vassily’s hammock swung behind her.

He’d fallen asleep surprisingly fast once she convinced him they weren’t going to throw him overboard, exhausted by the terror of four hours adrift spent waiting to die. Martin snored softly in the dim red light of the comms terminal, similarly tired. Nothing like learning you aren’t about to die to make you relax, she thought. Which was why she couldn’t sleep yet—

“No debt for payment in kind,” said the strange creature. “You bear much reduction of entropy.”

“Your translation program is buggy,” she muttered.

“Is so interrogative? Suppose, we. Reiterate and paraphrase: question why you do not attack Bouncers like other ships?”

Rachel tensed. “Because we are not part of their expedition,” she said slowly. “We have different intentions. We come in peace. Exchange information. We will entertain you. Is that understood?”

“Ahum. Skreee—” the thing in the screen turned its head right around to look over its shoulder. “We you understand. Will Bouncers of notify peaceful intent. You part are not of not-old administrative institution territoriality of planet?”

“No, we’re from Earth.” Martin stopped snoring: she glanced sideways. One eye was open, watching her tiredly. “Original world of humans,” she clarified.

“Know about Dirt. Know about you-mans, too. Information valuable, tell all!”

“In due course,” Rachel hedged, acutely aware of the thickening air in the capsule. “Are we safe from the Bouncers?”

“Am not understanding,” the thing said blandly. “We are will notify Bouncers of your intent. Is that not safety?”

“Not exactly.” Rachel glanced at Martin, who frowned at her and shook his head slightly. “If you notify the Bouncers that we are not attacking them, will that stop them from eating us?”

“Ahum!” The creature blinked at her. “Maybe not.”

“Well, then. What will stop the Bouncers from attacking us?”

“Skree—why worry? Just talk.”

“I’m not worrying. It’s just that I am not going to tell you everything you want to know about me until I am no longer at risk from the Bouncers. Do you understand that?”

“Ha-frumph\ Not entertaining us. Humph. A-okay, Bouncers will not eat you.

We have dietary veto over theys. Now tell all?”

“Sure. But first—” She glanced at the autopilot monitor. “We’re running low on breathable air. Need to land this ship. Is that possible? Can you tell me about conditions on the ground?”

“Sure.” The creature bounced its head up-down in a jerky parody of a nod.

“You not problem, land. May find things changed. Best dock here first. We Critics.”

“I’m looking for a man,” Rachel added, deciding to push her luck. “Have you installed a communications net? Can you locate him for us?”

“May exist. Name?”

“Rubenstein. Burya Rubenstein.” A noise behind her; Vassily rolling over, his hammock swinging in the shifting inertial reference frame of the lifeboat.

“Excuse.” The creature leaned forward. “Name Rubenstein?

Revolutionary?”

“Yes.” Martin frowned at her inquiringly: Rachel glanced sideways. I’ll explain later, she thought at him.

“Knows Sister Burya. Sister Seventh of Stratagems. You business with have the Extropian Underground?”

“That’s right.” Rachel nodded. “Can you tell me where he is?”

“Do better.” The thing in the screen grinned. “You accept orbital elements for rendezvous now. We take you there.”

Behind her, Vassily was sitting up, his eyes wide.

The Admiral didn't want to board the lifeboat.

“D-d-d-d-” he drooled, left eye glaring, right eye slack and lifeless.

“Sir, please don’t make a fuss. We need to go aboard now.” Robard looked over his shoulder anxiously, as if half-expecting red-clawed disaster to come stooping and drooling through the airlock behind him.

“N-ever surrr—” Kurtz found the effort too much; his head flopped forward onto his chest.

Robard hefted his chair, and pushed forward, into the cramped confines of the boat. “Is he going to be alright?” Lieutenant Kossov asked fussily.

“Who knows? Just show me somewhere to lash his chair and we’ll be off.

More chance of getting help for him down—”

Sirens honked mournfully in the passage outside, and Robard winced as his ears popped. Kossov reached past another officer wearing the braid of a lieutenant commander and yanked the emergency override handle: the outer door of the lifeboat hissed shut. “What’s going on?” someone called from up by the cockpit.

“Pressure breach in this section! Doors tight!”

“Aye, doors tight. Is the Admiral aboard?”

“Yes to that. You going?”

In answer, the deck heaved. Robard grabbed a stanchion and held on one-handed, bracing the Admiral’s wheelchair with another hand as the lifeboat lurched. A rippling bang of explosive bolts severed its umbilical connection to the stricken warship, then it was falling—falling through a deliberately opened gap in the ship’s curved-space field, which was otherwise strong enough to rip the small craft apart. Officers and a handful of selected enlisted men struggled to seize anchor points as whoever was in the hot seat played a fugue on the attitude thrusters, rolling the lifeboat out from behind the warship. Then the drive cut in with a gentle buzzing hiss from underfoot, and a modicum of weight returned them to the correct plane.

Robard bent to work on the wheelchair with a length of cable. “Someone help me with the Admiral,” he asked.

“What do you need?” Lieutenant Kossov peered at him, owlish behind his pince-nez.

“Need to tie this chair down. Then—where are we landing? Is there a doctor aboard this boat? My master really needs to be taken to a hospital, as soon as possible. He’s very ill.”

“Indeed.” The Lieutenant glanced at him sympathetically, then his gaze wandered to the somnolent Admiral. “Give me that.”

Robard passed him the other end of the cable, and together they secured the wheelchair to four of the eye bolts that dotted the floor. Around them, the other surviving officers were taking stock of the situation, neatly unfolding emergency deceleration hammocks from overhead lockers and chatting quietly. The atmosphere aboard the lifeboat was subdued, chastened; they were lucky to be alive, ashamed not to be aboard the stricken battlecruiser. The fact that most of the survivors were officers from the admiral’s staff didn’t go amiss; the real warriors remained at their posts, trying valiantly to halt the plague that was eating the ship around them. In one corner, a junior lieutenant was sobbing inconsolably at the center of an embarrassed circle of silence.

The Admiral, oblivious to everything around him, mumbled and coughed querulously. Kossov leaned forward attentively. “Is there anything I can do for you, my Admiral?” he asked.

“I fear he’s beyond our help,” Robard said sadly. He rested a gentle hand on Kurtz’s shoulder, steadying the Admiral in his chair. “Unless the surgeons can do something—”

“He’s trying to talk,” Kossov snapped. “Let me listen.” He leaned close to the old warrior’s face. “Can you hear me, sir?”

“A-a—” The Admiral gargled in the back of his throat.

“Don’t excite him, I implore you! He needs rest!”

Kossov fixed the servant with a baleful eye. “Be silent for a minute.”

“—Aah, arr—we—’oing?”

Robard started. “Humbly report we are on our way down to the planetary surface, sir,” said the Lieutenant. “We should be arriving in the capital shortly.” Nothing about the rest of the fleet, the disposition of which was anything but likely to arrive in the colonial capital.

“’Ood.” The Admiral’s face relaxed, eyelids drooping.

“’Amprey. I’ve’m wha’ for.” He subsided, evidently exhausted by the effort of speaking.

Robard straightened up: his eyes met those of the Lieutenant. “He never gives up,” he said calmly. “Even when he ought to. It’ll be the death of him one of these days …”

Riding a chicken-legged hut through a wasteland that had recently gone from bucolic feudalism to transcendent posthumanism without an intervening stage, Burya Rubenstein drifted through a dream of crumbling empires.

The revolutionaries were ideologically committed to a transcendence that they hadn’t fully understood—until it arrived whole and pure and incomprehensible, like an iceberg of strange information breaking the surface of a frozen sea of entropy. They hadn’t been ready for it; nobody had warned them. They had hazy folk memories of Internets and cornucopiae to guide them, cargo-cult assertions of the value of technology—but they hadn’t felt the elephant, had no sense of the shape the new phenomena took, and their desires caused new mutant strains to congeal out of the phase space of the Festival machinery.

Imagine not growing up with telephones—or faxes, video conferencing, online translation, gesture recognition, light switches. Tradition said that you could send messages around the world in an eyeblink, and the means to do so was called e-mail. Tradition didn’t say that e-mail was a mouth morphing out of the nearest object and speaking with a friend’s lips, but that was a more natural interpretation than strange textual commands and a network of post-office routers. The Festival, not being experienced in dealing with Earth-proximate human cultures, had to guess at the nature of the miracles being requested. Often, it got them wrong.

Burya knew all about communications; his grandfather had dandled him on his knee and passed on legends his own grandfather had told him, legends about management information systems that could tell the management everything they could possibly know about the world and more, legends about the strange genii of human resources that could bring forth any necessary ability at will. Some of the more wired dissidents of Novy Petrograd had cobbled together something which they, in turn, called a management information system: cameras squatted with hooded cyclopean eyes atop the garrets and rooflines of the city, feeding images into the digital nervous system of the revolution.

Before he’d left Plotsk, Burya had spent some time with Timoshevski. Oleg had applied the leeches to Burya’s engorged sense of importance, reminding him that he was only a high official within the Novy Petrograd soviet, that the soviet, in turn, was only a benign parasite upon the free market, a load-balancing algorithm that would be abandoned when the true beauty of the level playing field could be established. Oleg had also applied the worms, which itched furiously (and occasionally burned) as they established contact with Burya’s nervous system. He’d had to inquire pointedly as to the origins of Burya’s strange sense of bourgeois incrementalism in order to goad his erstwhile colleague into accepting the upgrade, but in the end, Rubenstein had seen no alternative. Given his currently peripatetic occupation, he’d be sidelined by the Central Committee if he stayed out of touch much longer. And so it was that his head itched abominably, and he was plagued by strange visions as the worms of the Committee for State Communications forged a working relationship with his brain.

When Burya slept, he dreamed in rasterized false-color images, scanned from the rooftops of the capital. The revolution, eternally vigilant, multitasked on his lateral geniculate body, rousting slumbering synapses to recognize suspicious patterns of behavior. Burya found it both disturbing and oddly reassuring to see that the city, for all the changes wrought by the revolution, continued. Here a youth darted from shadow to shadow, evidently on a midnight assignation with his sweetheart; there a grimmer kind of conspiracy fomented, dogs fighting over the bones of temporal responsibility as a block warden stalked a resented houseowner with murder in his eye. Houses grew and fissioned in slow motion, great sessile beasts prodded hither and yon by their internal symbionts. It was all unspeakably alien to him: an eerie half-life crawling over the once-familiar city, echoes of the way he’d lived for years, lying like a corpse in an open casket. Even the searing light of a nighttime shuttle landing at the field outside the city couldn’t bring it back to a semblance of the life he’d known.

Burya dreamed, too, of his own family; a wife he hadn’t seen in fourteen years, a five-year-old son whose chubby face blurred with distance.

(Internal exile was not a sentence of exclusion from family, but she came from solid middle-class stock, had disowned him upon hearing of his sentence and been granted a legal separation.) A helpless, weak loneliness— which he cursed whenever he noticed it in waking life—dogged his heels. The revolutionary junta had barely affected the course of events; it provided a nucleus for the wilder elements to coagulate around, a lens to focus the burning rays of resentment on the remains of the ancient regime, but in and of itself, it had achieved little. People suddenly gifted with infinite wealth and knowledge rapidly learned that they didn’t need a government—and this was true as much for members of the underground as for the workers and peasants they strove to mobilize. Perhaps this was the message that the Critic had been trying to drum into him ever since his abduction from the offices of the revolutionary soviet—the revolution he had been striving for didn’t need him.