Singularity Sky (45 page)

“A package? What kind of package?”

She turned and pointed at the steamer trunk, which now rested on the grass in the middle of a collapsing heap of structural trusses, belching steam quietly. “That kind of package.”

“That kind of—” His eyes gave him away. Rachel reached out and took his elbow.

“Come on, Martin. Let’s check out the tree line.”

“But—” He glanced over his shoulder. “Okay.”

“It’s like this,” Rachel began, as they walked. “Remember what I said about helping the people of the New Republic? A while ago—some years, actually—some people in a department you don’t really need to know much about decided that they were ripe for a revolution. Normally we don’t get involved in that kind of thing; toppling regimes is bad ju-ju even if you disapprove of them or do it for all the right moral reasons. But some of our analysts figured there was a chance, say twenty percent, that the New Republic might metastasize and turn imperial. So we’ve been gearing up to ship power tools to their own home-grown libertarian underground for a decade now.

“The Festival … when it arrived, we didn’t know what it was. If I’d known what you told me once we were under way, back at Klamovka, I wouldn’t be here now. Neither would the luggage. Which is the whole point of the exercise, actually. When the aristocracy put down the last workers’ and technologists’ soviet about 240 years ago, they destroyed the last of the cornucopiae the New Republic was given at its foundation by the Eschaton.

Thereafter, they could control the arbeiter classes by restricting access to education and tools and putting tight bottlenecks on information technology.

This luggage, Martin, it’s a full-scale cornucopia machine. Design schemata for just about anything a mid-twenty-first-century postindustrial civilization could conceive of, freeze-dried copies of the Library of Congress, all sorts of things. Able to replicate itself, too.” The tree line was a few meters ahead.

Rachel stopped and took a deep breath. “I was sent here to turn it over to the underground, Martin. I was sent here to give them the tools to start a revolution.”

“To start a—” Martin stared at her. ”But you’re too late.“

“Exactly.” She gave him a moment for it to sink in. “I can still complete my mission, just in case, but I don’t really think …”

He shook his head. “How are we going to get out of this mess?”

“Um. Good question.” She turned and faced the melting reentry capsule, then reached into a pocket and began bringing out some spare optical spybots. Vassily was aimlessly circling the perimeter of the clearing.

“Normally, I’d go to ground in the old town and wait. In six months, there’ll be a merchant ship along. But with the Festival—”

“There’ll be ships,” Martin said with complete assurance. “And you’ve got a cornucopia, you’ve got a whole portable military-industrial complex. If it can make us a lifeboat, I’m sure I can program it to manufacture anything we need to survive until we’ve got a chance to get off this godforsaken hole.

Right?”

“Probably.” She shrugged. “But first I really ought to make contact, if only to verify that there’s no point in handing the luggage over.” She began to walk back toward the lander. “This Rubenstein is supposed to be fairly levelheaded for a revolutionary. He’ll probably know what—” There was a distant cracking sound, like sticks breaking. At the other side of the clearing, Vassily was running back toward the luggage. “Shit!” Rachel dragged Martin to the ground, fumbled for the stunner in her pocket.

“What is it?” he whispered.

“I don’t know.”

“Damn. Well, looks like they’ve found us, whoever they are. Nice knowing you.” A large, hunched thing, hugely, monstrously bipedal, lurched into the clearing: a vast mouth like a doorway gaped at them.

“Wait.” Rachel held him down with one hand. “Don’t move. That thing’s wired like a fucking tank, sensors everywhere.”

The thing swung toward the lander, then abruptly squatted on its haunches.

A long, flat tongue lolled groundward; something big appeared at the top of it and stepped down to the meadow. It swept its head from side to side, taking in the decrepitating lifeboat, Vassily hiding behind it, the rest of the clearing. Then it called out, in a surprisingly deep voice. “Hello? We arrive not-warfully. Is there a Rachel Mansour here?”

Well, here goes. She stood up and cleared her throat. “Who wants to know?”

The Critic grinned at her, baring frighteningly long tusks: “I am Sister Seventh. You come in time! We a crisis have!”

People began gathering outside the Ducal palace around evening. They came in ones and twos, clumped shell-shocked beneath the soot-smeared outer walls. They looked much like any other citizens of the New Republic; perhaps a bit poorer, a bit duller than most.

Robard stood in the courtyard and watched them through the gates. Two of the surviving ratings stood there, guns ready, a relic of temporal authority.

Someone had found a flag, charred along one edge but otherwise usable.

The crowd had begun to form about an hour after they raised it to fly proudly in the light breeze. The windows might be broken and the furniture smashed, but they were still soldiers of His Imperial Majesty, and by God and Emperor there were standards, and they would be observed—so the Admiral had indicated, and so they were behaving.

Robard breathed in deeply. Insect bite? A most suspicious insect, indeed.

But since it had stung the Admiral, his condition had improved remarkably.

His left cheek remained slack, and his fingers remained numb, but his arm—

Robard and Lieutenant Kossov had borne their ancient charge to the control tower, cursing and sweating in the noon-day heat. As they arrived, Kurtz had thrown a fit; choking, gasping, choleric, thrashing in his wheelchair. Robard had feared for the worst, but then Dr. Hertz had come and administered a horse syringe full of adrenaline. The Admiral subsided, panting like a dog: and his left eye had opened and rolled sideways, to fix Robard with a skewed stare. “What is it, sir? Is there anything I can get you?”

“Wait.” The Admiral hissed. He tensed, visibly. “’M all hot. But it’s so clear.”

Both hands moved, gripping the sides of his wheelchair, and to Robard’s shock the old man rose to his feet. “My Emperor! I can walk!”

Robard’s feelings as he caught his employer were impossible to pin down.

Disbelief, mostly, and pride. The old man shouldn’t be able to do that; in the aftermath of his stroke, he’d been paralyzed on one side. Such lesions didn’t heal, the doctor had said. But Kurtz had risen from his chair and taken a wobbly step forward—

From the control tower to the castle, events had moved in a dusty blur.

Requisitioned transport, a bouncing ride through a half-deserted town, half the houses in it burned to the ground and the other half sprouting weird excrescences. The castle, deserted. Get the Admiral into the Duke’s bedroom. Find the kitchen, see if there’s anything edible in the huge underground larders. Someone hoisted a flag. Guards on the gate. Two timid serving women like little mice, scurrying from hiding and curtsying to the service they’d long since been broken to. A cleaning detail, broken furniture ruthlessly consigned to the firewood heap that would warm the grand ballroom. Emergency curtains—steel-mesh and spider-silk—furled behind the tall and shattered windows. Guards on the gate, with guns.

Check the water pipes. More uniforms moving in the dusty afternoon heat.

Busy, so busy.

He’d stolen a minute to break into Citizen Von Beck’s office. None of the revolutionary cadres had got that far into the castle, or survived the active countermeasures. All the Curator’s tools lay handy; Robard had paused to check the emergency causal channel, but its entropy had been thoroughly maximized even though the bandwidth monitor showed more than fifty percent remaining. His worst suspicions confirmed, he made liberal use of the exotic insecticides Von Beck had stocked, spraying his person until the air was blue and chokingly unbreathable. Then he pocketed a small artifact—one that it was illegal on pain of death for anyone not of the Curator’s Office to be in possession of—left the room, locked it behind him, and returned to the duties of the Admiral’s manservant.

The aimless cluster outside the Ducal palace had somehow metamorphosed into a crowd while he’d been busy. Anxious, pinched faces stared at him: the faces of people uncertain who they were, bereft of their place in the scheme of things. Lost people, desperately seeking reassurance. Doubtless many would have joined the dissident underground; many more would have made full use of the singular conditions brought about by the arrival of the Festival to maximize their personal abilities. For years to come, even if the Festival vanished tomorrow, the outback would be peopled by ghouls and wizards, talking animals and sagacious witches.

Some people didn’t want to transcend their humanity; a life of routine reassurance was all they craved, and the Festival had deprived them of it.

Was that an army greatcoat lurking at the back of the square? A sallow-faced man, half-starved, who in other circumstances Robard would have pegged for a highwayman; here he was just as likely to be the last loyal dregs of a regiment that had deserted en masse. Snap judgments could be treacherous.

He looked farther. Dust, rising in the distance, perhaps half a mile away.

Hmm.

The grand hallway opened from the front doors and led to the main staircase, the ballroom, and numerous smaller, more discreet destinations.

Normally, a manservant would have used a small side entrance. Today, Robard strode in through the huge doors that normally would have welcomed ambassadors and knights of the realm. Nobody watched his dusty progress across the floor, treading dirt into shattered tiles and bypassing the shattered chandelier. He didn’t stop until he reached the entrance to the Star Chamber.

“—other leg of lamb. Damn your eyes, can’t you knock, man?”

Robard paused in the doorway. The Admiral was sitting at the Governor’s desk, eating a platter of cold cuts—very cold, preserved meats and pickles from the cellar—with Commander Leonov and two of the other surviving staff officers standing attentively by. “Sir. The revolutionary guards are approaching. We have about five minutes to decide whether to fight or talk.

Can I suggest you leave the rest of your meal until after we have dealt with them?”

Leonov rounded on him. “You bounder, how dare you disturb the Admiral!

Get out!”

Robard raised his left hand and turned it over, revealing the card he held.

“Have you ever seen one of these before?”

Leonov turned white. “I—I—”

“I don’t have time for this,” Robard said brusquely. To the Admiral; “My lord?”

Kurtz stared at him with narrowed eyes. “How long?”

Robard shrugged. “All the time I’ve been with you, my lord. For your own protection. As I was saying, a crowd is moving in our direction from the south bank, over the old bridge. We have about five minutes to decide what to do, but I doubt we will make any friends by shooting at them.”

Kurtz nodded. “I will go and talk to them, then.”

Now it was Robard’s turn to stare. “Sir, I believe you should be in a wheelchair, not arguing with revolutionaries. Are you quite sure—”

“Haven’t felt this good in, oh, about eight years, young feller. The bees around here pack a damned odd sting.”

“Yes, you could say that. Sir, I believe you may have been compromised.

The Festival apparently has access to a wide range of molecular technologies, beyond the one that’s done such a sterling job on your cerebrovascular system. If they wanted—”

Kurtz raised a hand. “I know. But we’re at their mercy in any event. I will go down to the people and talk. Were any of the crowd old?”

“No.” Robard puzzled for a moment. “None that I saw. Do you suppose—”

“A cure for old age is a very common wish,” Kurtz observed. “Dashed slug-a-beds want to be shot by a jealous husband, not a nurse bored with emptying the bedpan. If this Festival has been granting wishes, as our intelligence put it …” He stood up. “Get me my dress uniform, Rob—oh.

You, yes you, Kossov. You’re my batman now Robard here outranks you all. And my medals!”

Leonov, white as a sheet, still hadn’t stopped shaking. “It’s alright,” Robard said sepulchrally. “I don’t usually have people executed for being rude to me.”

“Sir! Ah—yes, sir! Um, if I may ask—”

“Ask away.”

“Since when is an Invigilator of the Curator’s Office required to disguise himself as a manservant?”

“Since”—Robard pulled out his pocket watch and glanced at it—“about seven years and six months ago, at the request of the Archduke. Really.

Nobody notices a servant, you know. And His Excellency—” Kossov returned bearing the trappings of high office. Leonov ushered Robard out onto the landing while the Admiral dressed. “His Excellency is not in direct line to the throne. If you take my meaning.” Leonov did, and his sharp intake of breath—combined with the stress analyzers wired into his auditory nerves—told Robard everything he needed to know. “No, His Majesty had no expectation of a coup; the Admiral is unquestionably loyal. But his personal charisma, fame as a hero of the Republic, and wide popularity, made his personal safety a matter of some importance. We can use him here.”

“Oh.” Leonov thought for a while. “The revolutionaries?”

“If he pushes them, they’ll crumble,” Robard said decisively. “All their strongest supporters have long since fled; that’s the nature of a singularity.

If they don’t”—he tapped his pocket—“I am licensed to take extraordinary measures in the defense of the Republic, including the use of proscribed technologies.”

Leonov dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief. “Then it’s all over.

You’ll break the revolutionaries by force or by politics, install His Excellency as governor pro tern, and in six months time it will all be over, bar the shouting.”

“I wouldn’t say that. Even if the woman from Earth was right—and I am inclined to think she was telling the truth about the Festival not being interested in planetary conquest as we understand it, in which case this whole expedition has been a monstrously expensive mistake—we’ve lost two-thirds of the population. We can never get rid of the pernicious virus of bandwidth that they’ve infected this planet with; we may have to abandon the colony, or at the very least institute quarantine procedures. The bloody revolutionaries have won, here, the djinn is well and truly out of the bottle.